So Close

Hélène Cixous, Centre de Recherches en études Féminines at Paris VIII University, France.

• So Close. A Translator's Note.

"The pages of So Close are soaked with tears ... Cixous's prose - impressively rendered into English by one of Derrida's principal translators, Peggy Kamuf - is hallucinatory, richly allusive and poetic ... sly humour tugs you back into her world, pulls you headlong towards an epiphany, into a great swell of emotion, a rush of memories, sensations, impressions, like the crescendo of a symphony, whose effect is all the more powerful because it cannot be explained or described. The devastating climax of the book is moving beyond words."Jewish Chronicle "This translation of a key text marks an important step forward in making Cixous accessible to a wider public. Peggy Kamuf has achieved the impossible, succeeding both in rendering the subtlety of Cixous's thinking and in conveying a sense of the beauty of her prose."Mairéad Hanrahan, University College London"So Close is sensationally truthful. It approaches Algeria through the unexpected realms of writing, where literature and reality almost touch. This fiction has a child's ability to believe; a child who has read Proust and the Greeks, lived through history, and can still sense the danger sleeping in a macaroon."Sarah Wood, University of Kent