Trading Secrets Book

Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1998, this book is the work of one of France's most celebrated and interesting novelists writing at the height of her powers. It is fiction that leads readers through fascinating chambers of life where autobiography is constantly reimagined. A darkly comic novel about four women aging less-than-gracefully, Trading Secrets takes us to an academic conference in Kansas where, in an encounter between Aurore, a French woman, and her American counterpart, Gloria, the differences between their two cultures become sharply apparent. The result is a bitingly funny portrait of painfully complex, psychologically damaged individuals, all of whom have been, in some sense, "colonized." The novel also offers an incisive picture of a French posture toward things American, from race relations to feminism to academia. As Paule Constant herself has said: "C'est un livre en miroir." The book is a mirror, both in how its characters reflect one another and in what it shows us of ourselves and our world.

Library Journal

The 1998 winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt (France's highest literary honor), this is the second of Constant's seven novels to appear in English. Fans of the earlier work, The Governor's Daughter, will find themselves in different terrain here. Set in a mythical Kansas university town, the book centers on four participants of a feminist colloquium who share a house and their lives: Lola, the alcoholic has-been actress; Babette, the Jewish Algerian exile; Aurore, the white French novelist raised in Africa; and Gloria, the black American hostess who plagiarizes Aurore's work. Bound together by different strains of loss and exile, each strives to maintain her dignity and self-worth while refusing to reveal her isolation to the others. Through extended character studies that reveal each woman's life history, Constant suggests that they may all be different aspects of an everywoman, victimized by relationships and bad choices. The feminist urge is accentuated by the impersonal names assigned to the men in their lives (e.g., the Photographer, the Stagehand). A somber but engaging work that provides keen insight into the feminist psyche. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.