Translated by Kate Briggs, with an introduction by Eimear McBride
Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, explores 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 publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette’s singular take on the ‘poetic novel’. This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette’s work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.
‘In Hélène Bessette’s novel Lili is Crying, the tears are unavoidable. They’re in the title, and ten pages in, I was emailing everyone I could about the book. It 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, 4 Columns
‘This scintillating 1953 novel from Bessette (1918–2000) follows the beautiful Lili, who’s 40 and looks 20, through one heartache after another as she contends with her possessive mother’s hold on her…. What keeps this novel running is not the plot but 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. Briggs’s ear is highly trained to Bessette’s singular register, making this rediscovery all the more noteworthy.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘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
‘Living literature, for me, in France today – it’s Hélène Bessette.’
— Marguerite Duras
‘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
‘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
‘Lili is Crying 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 Sams, 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
‘AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW.’
— Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the Metro
Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Cazes prize in 1954 and was twice in the running for the Goncourt prize and the Médicis prize.
Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. This Little Art, her genre-bending essay on the art of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. In 2021, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her debut novel, The Long Form, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize the same year.
Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
