Life Sciences
Life Sciences
By Joy Sorman
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Introduction by Catherine Lacey
“Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?”
—Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632062956
Publication date: Oct 12, 2021
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment—one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye disease. Ninon grows up comforted and fascinated by the recitation of these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her wrists to her shoulders.
Embarking on a dizzying and frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists, procedures, needles, scans, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure for her ailment. She seeks to break the curse and reclaim her body by any means necessary, through increasing isolation and failed treatment after failed treatment, even as her life falls apart. A provocative and empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, Life Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers.
Praise for Life Sciences
Winner of the 2022 French-American Foundation Translation Prize
2021 Foreword INDIES Finalist – Literary Fiction
“Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?… Translated by Lara Vergnaud into prose that is both deceptively simple and playfully archaic, Sorman’s story [is] among the first to tackle illness as metaphor, as birthright and as feminist rebellion…. Sorman’s alternative history of female malady offers both a horrific dose of truth and a comforting alternative to the stories sick women have told ourselves since time began.”
—Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“An arresting allegory…. [Ninon’s] determination to jump ‘out of the line of cursed, mad, degenerate women’ makes her an engaging character as well as a powerful cipher of resistance to the stories she’s grown up with…. Readers will feel empowered by this tale of taking control of one’s body.”
“Sorman uses her protagonist's suffering to critique the medical establishment, with its massive imbalance of power between doctor and patient…. Her detached tone, which Lara Vergnaud makes crisp and stylized, adds to the sense of novel-as-critique: often, Sorman's narrator seems to be speaking in voiceover, as if Ninon were the subject of a documentary. This strategy serves to alienate the reader from Ninon, precisely as Ninon's pain alienates her from her mother and from her peers. Life Sciences is a lonely book—and, for that reason, an effective one…. It forces the reader to reckon with what Ninon is going through.”
—Lily Meyer, NPR
“It’s an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot—or does not want to—cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. Life Sciences is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy.”
—Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
“A singular insight from this torrent of an illness narrative—spoiler be damned—is that we might be most healed by a practitioner, healer, or otherwise, who takes their own medicine, who is sick with us. As Joy Sorman's protagonist Ninon makes her medical rounds, racked with a mystifying pain, her circle of healers widens (is a tattoo artist one?). And as this propulsive book, like pain itself, metabolizes all healers, I begin to notice the witchy inroads of help, where or if it can happen, or—stakes derange—if help helps.”
—Caren Beilin, author of Blackfishing the IUD and Revenge of the Scapegoat
“The second novel from Sorman, a prizewinning novelist based in Paris, comes to us in a beautiful translation by Vergnaud, with an introduction by Catherine Lacey propounding a feminist interpretation… the ending is worth getting to. Will appeal to mystic intellectuals, Francophile feminists, and skeptics of both Western and Eastern medicine.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“How many women have been patted on the head by a doctor (usually a male) and told, ‘It's all in your head, sweetie’? That is what I kept thinking throughout this book. Was her young age and gender working against her as she sought opinion after opinion? Would she have been taken more seriously if she was a male? An interesting and thought-provoking novel.”
—Cheryl Reigle, OutWest Books (Grand Junction, CO)
“Life Sciences is an incredibly good book about chronic illness and pain, learning to deal with it and make sense of it emotionally, as well as relearning to live your life either with the pain, or in the wake of it. It also focuses on a woman’s experience of being chronically ill…. It’s incredibly relatable and very validating.”
“This book was an unexpected delight. The writing is both dreamily impressionistic and extraordinarily precise in the ways it describes Ninon the protagonist's illness and attempts to get well. This is a very cerebral book but it is not without heart.”
—Amanda Toronto, Word Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Pascal Ito - Flammarion
Joy Sorman is a novelist and documentarian who lives and works in Paris. Her first novel, Boys, boys, boys, was awarded the 2005 Prix de Flore. In 2013, she received the Prix François Mauriac from the Académie française for Comme une bête. Life Sciences is her first novel to be translated into English.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She is the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and two PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and was a finalist for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Her forthcoming translations include works by Mohamed Leftah and Franck Bouysse. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.
© Lawrence Agyei
Catherine Lacey is a Guggenheim fellow, a Whiting Award winner, and the author of four works of fiction: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew.
THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED WITH SUPPORT FROM THE FACE FOUNDATION
BOOK DETAILS
Paperback ISBN: 9781632062956 • $18
Publication date: Oct 12, 2021
5" x 7.125" • 272 pages
Fiction: Chronic Illness / Women / Relationships / Medicine5" x 7.125" • 272 pages
Rights: World English, Audio
eBook ISBN: 9781632062963
By Joy Sorman
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Introduction by Catherine Lacey
“Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?”
—Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632062956
Publication date: Oct 12, 2021