Anne F. Garréta

Anne F. Garréta (born 1962) is a French novelist and a member of the experimental literary group Oulipo. A graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest, A***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994, and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won the Prix Médicis in 2002 for her novel Pas un jour. awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award—Georges Perec won in 1978).

Works

Sphinx (Grasset, 1986); English translation by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, 2015)

Pour en finir avec le genre humain (Editions François Bourin, 1987)

Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990)

La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999)

Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002)

Éros Mélancolique (with Jacques Roubaud) (Grasset, 2009)

External Links

An extract from the English Translation of Sphinx