A Little Party Dress

A Little Part Dress: lyric essays

by Christian Bobin

translated from the French by Alison Anderson

In these eleven contemplative sketches  Christian Bobin reflects upon time, attention, solitude, companionship, and grace. Amid the increasingly mediated and sensationalist literature of our day, here is a quiet yet powerful plea for sanity, simplicity, and a return to basic things.

“She is dirty. Even clean she is dirty. She is covered in gold and excrement, in children and saucepans. She is omnipotent. She is like a greasy, dirty queen who has nothing left to  govern, as she has already invaded everywhere, has already contaminated  everything with her intrinsic filth. No one can resist her. She reigns by virtue of an eternal yearning for the depths, for the black hole of time. In prison she is like a tranquilizer. In certain psychiatric  hospitals she is always on duty. It is in such places that she is most  in her element: no one looks at her, no one listens to her, they let her waffle on in her corner, they place before her those they no longer know what to do with.” — from “Evil.”

“If Christian Bobin were a painter, his canvases would probably look a lot like Degas’ — deftly drawn glimpses of ordinary life caught from a deliciously eccentric angle and suffused with light and an unvarnished realism that confronts you with its sheer and singular immediacy.”

Steve Bradbury Rain Taxi Review of Books (Vol. 16 No. 1, 2011)