Suite for Barbara Loden

“Please, just write me an entry for the encyclopedia, not a self-portrait.”

A brilliant example of novel in the genre of metafiction, where the narrator, Nathalie Léger is trying to write a straightforward encyclopedia entry about a 1970s movie titled Wanda starring Barbara Loden. It turns meta when Léger isn’t able to find enough facts about Barbara Loden to write her entry, so she spirals and turns the entire entry inside out as an exposition on what it means to fail at writing a biography.

Léger decides she needs to go on essentially a ghost hunt across Pennsylvania mining towns to track down scenes in the film such as one where a bank robbery occurred. She then starts to relate things back to her and Loden’s own life in her encyclopedia entry.

“Someone who knew Barbara Loden well told me: ‘She said it is easy to be avant-garde but it is really difficult to tell a simple story well.”

“It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly where we are.”

Its a short and strange book that was enjoyable enough. Recommended for a quick read on at a cafe.

“I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her own story through that of another woman.”