A forgotten mid-century genius, recently rediscovered in France and never before translated into English, Hélène Bessette is a treasure and a bracing force to reckon with
Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, conveys with singular force the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother, Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love—of desire run cold—and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial 1953 publication for its boundary-pushing style, Lili Is Crying catapulted Bessette to cult status in France. The novel is moving and maddening in turns, with its characters trapped in their own cruelties and sorrows, but in its spareness and strength it feels true. "Show me a woman who's chosen something." Bessette's books were hailed for their unusual economy of expression, rarity, strange humor, and sheer vivacity. She characterized her new kind of novel as "a freshly cut slice of life, whose force comes from its lack of commentary."
It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere.It’s an electric storm. It started, we’re not told when—and it hasn’t ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying.
— Kate Briggs
Bessette’s remarkable prose, complete with freewheeling swerves from spoken dialogue to internal monologue, propels the action without losing sight of the characters’ intense emotions. Briggs's ear is highly trained to Bessette's singular register, making this rediscovery all the more noteworthy.
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette’s cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It’s also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place—a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs’s translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette’s voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
Lili isCrying is not straightforwardly tragic—as the title may initially trick us into believing—but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true.
— Saba Sam, author of Send Nudes
This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith.
— Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent
[Lili Is Crying] felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux. Lili shares the cartoon’s casual violence, which is not to say the novel is comic, though at times it is, yes, darkly funny. It is beautiful, brutal.
— Jennifer Kabat, 4columns
Bessette’s prose is prickly and snappy [in this] tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter.
— Francesca Peacock, The Spectator
Lili Is Crying tells of the poisonous, parasitic relationship between Charlotte and her daughter Lili. The novel is populated with gossip, yearning, and an all-consuming crush.
— Grace Linden, Los Angeles Review of Books
Kate Briggs’s deft translation brings Hélène Bessette’s novel into English for the first time. Bessette plays with line breaks and typography, exercising what Eimear McBride refers to in her beautiful introduction as “formal indiscipline”…. Lili is Crying is the loudest book I have ever read. From Lili’s “desperate sobs” to the “trumpeting love” of Lili and the shepherd, the writing rattles like a set of cutlery in a tumble dryer. Miraculously, all the noise coheres into an elegant symphony.
— Oonagh Devitt Tremblay, Literary Review
I’m grateful to Kate Briggs for her translation of Lili is Crying – a tragic, comic, invigorating book with an eccentric staccato style that blurs speech and thought.
— Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch
A manic, brilliant maze of a book. Circular, cinematic, comic.
— Sinéad Gleeson, author of Hagstone
Bessette’s remarkable prose, complete with freewheeling swerves from spoken dialogue to internal monologue, propelling the action without losing sight of the characters’ intense emotions.
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
This propulsive mother-daughter psychodrama was published to great acclaim in France in 1953 before falling into obscurity. The novel’s signature is its unusual form, which strings together short, hypnotic phrases, blurring the boundary between novel and poem.
— The New Yorker
Bessette asks the reader to step closer and look at the ceaseless, imperceptible moments in which they crack, scatter, and persevere.
