Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories
Colombe Schneck
May 2024 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Hillary Huber
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5 hr 31 min
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A Natalie Portman Book Club Pick
“Sinewy, tough, sharp . . . Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.” —Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic
From the award-winning and bestselling French author Colombe Schneck, a woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming
At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.
In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.
Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych—fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.
“Sinewy, tough, sharp . . . Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.” —Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic
From the award-winning and bestselling French author Colombe Schneck, a woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming
At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.
In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.
Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych—fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.
About the author
Colombe Schneck is documentary film director, a journalist, and the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. She has received prizes from the Académie française, Madame Figaro, and the Société des gens de lettres. The recipient of a scholarship from the Villa Medici in Rome as well as a Stendhal grant from the Institut français, she was born and educated in Paris, where she still lives.
Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among other publications. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
Natasha Lehrer is a writer, translator, editor, and teacher. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Frieze, and other journals. As literary editor of the Jewish Quarterly she has worked with writers including Deborah Levy, George Prochnik, and Joanna Rakoff. She has contributed to several books, most recently Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism. She has translated over two dozen books, including works by Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Amin Maalouf, Vanessa Springora, and Chantal Thomas. In 2016, she won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She lives in Paris.
Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among other publications. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
Natasha Lehrer is a writer, translator, editor, and teacher. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Frieze, and other journals. As literary editor of the Jewish Quarterly she has worked with writers including Deborah Levy, George Prochnik, and Joanna Rakoff. She has contributed to several books, most recently Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism. She has translated over two dozen books, including works by Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Amin Maalouf, Vanessa Springora, and Chantal Thomas. In 2016, she won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She lives in Paris.
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