Reviews
I own every book translated by translator and scholar Kim Ye-ryeong. Her translations walk shoulder to shoulder with the original work, moving forward alongside it; each is itself a work of art.
Natalie Léger: display
Natalie Léger’s Exposition is a novel about the life of the Countess of Castiglione, who was considered the great beauty of her time and an important early model in the history of photography during the Second Empire. Exposition is so focused on description that ekphrasis could be called its defining feature. The most beautifully chosen metonymic words are addressed, at the very end, to the backs of three girls who cannot be seen and cannot be seen at all (pp. 137–138). This is a delicate, elegant novel in which intellectual reflection, reminders of historical and artistic facts, and the narrator’s research into the Countess of Castiglione, considered the greatest beauty of the Second Empire, alternate in brief vignettes with the story of her mother, who lived an unhappy life. The translator’s afterword is every bit as dignified and graceful as the work itself. Léger’s Exposition keeps asking what an exhibition is, while continually recording and questioning the process of exhibiting as much as the finished exhibition. The conflicts and clashes that occur along the way are also written down and put on display, so the book can be said to contain everything about exhibitions. As the debate over the exhibition’s theme, “ruins,” shows, it openly and subtly presents fundamental differences over what should or should not be shown, and what is or is not worthy of being exhibited. The act of recording the exhibition is also a process of reflecting on and documenting Natalie Léger’s mother’s harsh life.
Korean title: 전시
Korean author: 나탈리 레제
Korean publisher: 봄날의책
ISBN-13: 9791192884349
Reviews
I own every book translated by translator and scholar Kim Ye-ryeong. Her translations walk shoulder to shoulder with the original work, moving forward alongside it; each is itself a work of art.
