Suite for Barbara Loden

Suite for Barbara Loden

<p>"I believe there is a miracle in <em>Wanda</em>," wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. "Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated." It is perhaps this --miracle--the seeming collapse of fiction and fact--that has made <em>Wanda </em>(1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Leger, the mysteries of <em>Wanda</em> launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. <em>Suite for Barbara Loden</em> is the magnificent result.</p><p>Moving contrapuntally between biography and autofiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, <em>Suite for Barbara Loden</em> is a stunning mediation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth --a kind of truth --not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination.</p><p>"Brilliant little book." --<strong>Valeria Luiselli</strong></p><p>"Inventive and affecting, it takes both the novel and the biography to new and interesting places."--<strong>Eimear McBride</strong></p>