This was an enjoyable read and I would recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author.

Jeanne is 20 something, or maybe 30 something, possibly 40 something. She loves men, or maybe just penises, or maybe just giving oral sex. She is a daring fellating adventuress around Paris, or she’s distracting herself from unhappiness or ennui, or maybe neither. Who knows. She meets them anonymously in hotel rooms that she pays for, and she stores away the look and taste and feel of it all, filing away the memories into rooms in her mind to revisit later, again and again. ‘The Collection’ subverts all ideas you might have had from reading about 'le nymphomane’, about desire, about what women want or perhaps need. We never find out who she is or why she might do what she’s doing. It’s dreamlike; the prose flows over you and through you, taking you somewhere else or nowhere else, somewhere between the very best and the very worst sex. It’s literary erotica which is simultaneously intriguing and arousing and frustrating and beautiful.

Jeanne on a sexual pursuit heading from hotel room to hotel room man to man.A book a pursuit that is unique odd a novella so well written kept me turning the pages.A book that leaves you in shock confused yet amazed by the lyrical writing.#netgalley#granatabooks.

This is an odd book. At first sight, it appears to be a fetishistic reflection on the male penis and it certainly is that but it is also something more to do with the way we construct reality! The story centres around a woman called Jeanne, the city of Paris and the rooms she creates in her head for storing the memories of the male members she encounters and relieves. There are a lot of them and Freud would probably see her as fixated as she details their individual textures, shape, skin tone and so on. She remembers them, while forgetting the men they are attached to. It is possible that she's a prostitute or, perhaps, she simply has a talent for leaning back against shop windows and being approached by men. There certainly isn't a business model underpinning what she does!

So, what is going on? First of all, the book seems to exist in its own cyberspace so that Jeanne's descriptions of what she does, sees and feels blend together into their own unique narrative held together by the Paris Metro network. That makes it something more than simply a soliloquy in the activity of creating an alternative reality of different rooms in her palace. Rooms are also important in the settings for the porn movies which she watches and the way they meld and overlap in a kind of crazy dance of stereotyped characters and moves.

There's a clue as well in the book she is reading on the Metro. It's the Neuromancer by William Gibson published in 1984 and critically acclaimed for its portrayal of a cyberpunk world where reality is only glimpsed through multiple representations of itself. That's the same idea as in the award winning film, The Matrix, except there is a villainy in that film pulling the strings. She also quotes JG Ballard, and Nina Leger's version of Paris echoes his ideas of the Bladerunner-like disassociation and alienation which cities give rise to. Of course, she's also called Jeanne and all these ideas link to the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and his assertions about the simulated world which also found their way into The Matrix. He was the thinker who suggested that the Iraqi War never actually took place, in the sense that all people ever saw of it was a simulated version, a simulacrum providing a doctored version of events which may or may not have happened but which the watchers saw as real.

All of this suggests that Nina Leger is doing something more than presenting a pathological case study. The cyberspace of the sexual swamp through which Jeanne travels is actually a representation of - if not our world - then the world of sex and relationships in the future. She has a point as well. The ‘Me Too’ allegations past and present, gender fluidity, the inability to reach convictions in cases of rape, dick pics, a universe of incestuous porn and the sexual preoccupations of the tabloid press all serve to present simulations of what is basically a biological function. You can argue whether there are malign forces, corporations or profit motives behind all this or whether it is simply a product of the inescapable march of technology but it makes this book much more than just a pervy sex romp.

As to what it really is, that's left to the reader to work out. Readers should be good at that because novels and stories might have been the first simulacra we all encountered!

The Collection is a perceptive and sharp send-up to the "male gaze" - a term that refers to the lens through which heterosexual men view women that is prevalent in various forms of art, depicting women as sexual objects to be gazed upon. The novel follows a young woman named Jeanne who engages in meaningless sexual encounters with random men in hotel rooms all around Paris with the intention of creating a "memory palace" from the mental images of their penises. There is a certain coldness to the narrative that left me wishing that the book had gone into more depth into Jeanne's character and her backstory because it seemed like, throughout the book, the reader is being deliberately held at arm's length from the protagonist's inner thought processes. And although I understand that the absence of concrete characterisation or plot might be intentional, it made it hard to sympathise with Jeanne or understand her actions, which consequently made me question the overall point of this circular novel.

The standout elements of this book are Legér's experiments with form and the depersonalised perspective, however, these same elements are also responsible for the novel's flaws. While it's a powerful, unflinching subversion of the male gaze, as the overreaching feminist themes become clear, the novel becomes rather repetitive and slowly fizzles out, instead of offering a strong ending to Jeanne's story that would make it more memorable.

This was every bit as strange as I was expecting. The writing was great. The subject matter won't appeal to everyone and it didn't even appeal to me but I was very curious.

I think it was just too much of the same thing and I had had enough before the ending.

I didn't care for the final section either. But I'm really happy this book exists in the world and appreciate a publisher actually publishing it. #netgalley

This is a book about cocks. A lot of them. A woman in Paris, about whom we know virtually nothing bar her name, Jeanne, has made them her specialist subject. Her modus operandi is to feign illness in doorways, then lead the gallant male who has come to her aid to a hotel. Jeanne likes hotels, and she likes cocks. In fact she has constructed a memory palace, the rooms of which she is free to wander at will, recalling “black skin, dark veins, light, supple testicles; red hairs, glans a purplish blue as though bruised, flushed penis; penis hunched up on itself like a burrowing animal; blurred penis, tortured outline; bare cylinder, pointed-cone pediment, sex-blueprint.” Jeanne has no interest in the men beyond this, and Leger gives virtually no other details about them, or indeed about Jeanne. In fact she teases us with the personae Jeanne might or might not adopt: neglected wife, recovering bulimic, child abuse victim.
Not much happens in The Collection beyond cock and hotel bedrooms. Jeanne visits a “sex shope” and builds an impressive collection of dildos. She watches a bit of porn. She tries to find representations of herself in fiction and, unsurprisingly, can’t.
As a formal exercise in subverting the male gaze – Jeanne’s priapic career begins when she finds herself staring at a man’s flies on the metro and realises that he is “petrified… divested of his rights over his own penis” – The Collection works brilliantly. As a piece of fiction – less so. The lack of context, of any emotional interpretation of Jeannes’ sexual odyssey, becomes fairly limiting, fairly quickly. Best take it at its face value then: a survey of a particular portion of male anatomy. And of hotels.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

The language is beautiful, the translation is lyrical and flowing, but I struggled to find any depth or anything here to hold me. It is a beautifully written list of penis-based encounters and doesn’t really go anywhere with it. Not one for me.

The Collection is as much a protest as it is a story. As a protest, it shines a light on the weak and tired tropes of heroines in literature; it demands an apology from the writers who have normalised hysteria in women, wounded and victimised women, strange and slutty women, and women who must be ashamed and apologetic for their lives and their choices. As a story, it’s a thrilling, surreal journey through the wonderful mind and daily life of a woman who puts her kink first: Jeanne has a collection to build, and she isn’t wasting time. Jeanne is a celebration of the kinds of things that exist “behind closed doors”. Her story is one that has the potential to make readers grit their teeth in frustration and turn away, or laugh and enjoy the ride, depending on what kind of reader they are. It’s up to you whether you choose to enjoy Jeanne and her story or not. Either way, she really couldn’t care less.

Full review here:
https://booksandbao.com/2019/07/31/review-the-collection-by-nina-leger/

I inhaled Nina Leger’s The Collection in one sitting which is so rare for me. Leger’s novella follows Jeanne from one Parisian hotel to the next in a frenzied state of hypersexual impulse. Jeanne’s oscillation between heady desire and her mental unravelling is portrayed with an intensity that I rarely come across in fiction. It took me a while to sit and mull over how I felt after finishing it as the reading experience is so disorientating and intense. I’d definitely recommend it though to breathe a breath of fresh (very erotic) air into your reading.

A journey through a woman’s mind palace of penises, which she collects through trysts in anonymous Parisian hotel rooms. The men are irrelevant - their forms, their beings, their stories are ignored in favour of the penis which Jeanne unapologetically objectifies. This book makes no attempt to explain the protagonist - her identity and motivations are irrelevant; there is no journey or meaning or redemption for her. If anything the book seems to take a jibe at novels which treat nymphomania as a disease to be cured (Leila Slimani’s Adele comes to mind) - ‘The novel, which had appeared free and wild, preferred to frolic in an enclosure of highly limited significations where sex could be nothing other than a symptom, the sign of a void that needed filling, of an anguish to be appeased, of a slowly healing wound.’

Quite a frustrating book in some respects as it was beautifully written and had great moments of depth, but something didn't quite click for me personally. I'm not certain if something may have been lost in translation, or perhaps I'm so used to novels - featuring characters like Jeanne - having far more blatant themes of destruction, I'm simply not sure how to process their near absence.

Overall, an interesting read that I'm sure that can generate a number discussions.

Worth a look.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc.

Of the many reading initiatives that occur online, Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) which happens in August is one of my favourites. So I’ve started the month with “The Collection” by Nina Leger, a slim newly-translated novel from France which has a very attractive cover although it’s most definitely not about mushrooms. It concerns a woman’s anonymous sexual encounters and while this might seem straightforward it’s given me a lot to think about it. So much so I have much more to say about this book than some other much longer novels and that’s not just because of its provocative subject matter. I was surprised by how emotionally engaged I felt with the story as well – especially because the full details of its protagonist’s identity remain pointedly obscure.

I admire fiction which deals frankly with sex because it feels like an important aspect of humanity which isn’t often dealt with in literary fiction in a proportion similar to how often it preoccupies our actual lives. Marlon James has commented in interviews how when sex is portrayed in literary fiction it’s often only referred to in ellipses or portrayed as a shame-filled activity. I think the difficulty a lot of authors have in writing about sex is that they don’t want their prose to come across as indulging in sensual fantasy or titillating for the sake of it. But equally there is a hesitancy when portraying all the awkward reality of people’s bodies.

The writer William Gass claimed readers don’t really want to see under the skirt because “What good is my peek at her pubic hair if I must also see the red lines made by her panties, the pimples on her rump, broken veins like the print of a lavender thumb, the stepped-on look of a day’s-end muff? I’ve that at home.” In “Bluets” Maggie Nelson gives an emphatic riposte to this assumption that readers only want an idealized portrayal of bodies engaged in sex: “For my part I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or an airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses and light.”

Nina Leger’s novel gives just such a frank view as it catalogues the sexual exploits of its protagonist Jeanne who visits many hotels having sex with anonymous men. Rather than flesh out the lives and personalities of any of these men or Jeanne herself, we’re only given explicit descriptions of the men’s genitals which Jeanne gathers to form a “memory palace” of these encounters. Who she is or why she prefers anonymous sex remains a mystery and Leger even playfully toys with the expectations of the reader that she might be a discontent wife, a trauma victim, a secret lesbian or a nymphomaniac. All we know is that her sexual exploits are an important aspect of Jeanne’s life and they are something she pursues with rigorous dedication.

The hotel rooms she visits aren’t spaces for her to enact a side of herself which she doesn’t show in her ordinary life. It’s stated “There will be no reverse side to the set, as the hotel rooms are not a stage; no concealed wings, in which Jeanne sheds her ordinary self in favour of an extraordinary costume.” Over the course of the novel it’s not Jeanne’s actions which feel performative, but the routine of ordinary life which reveals itself to be a façade. Hotel rooms are dressed to be as mundane and interchangeable as possible. People she encounters go about their days keeping sex a hushed and secretive activity. Society teaches people to keep their social identities and sexual identities completely separate.

In one hilarious scene Jeanne is on public transport and her bag which contains sex toys hangs open. A child tries to grasp one of these toys and its mother sharply remonstrates Jeanne demanding she close her bag while the other passengers gaze at her with amused disapproval. The awkwardness of this situation is acute, but Jeanne is entirely unapologetic about it because the difficulty is not with her; it’s the people around that have the issue as they are projecting their own insecurities and fears upon her. They are the ones that feel any open expression of sexuality is a transgression that must be kept behind closed doors.

Leger seems to comment on the way literature generally handles sex in novels when she describes Jeanne’s frustration at not being able to find someone like her in what she reads, “At one time, she looked for her alter ego in novels and sometimes thought she had found her there... In each new text, she hoped to find what the previous had lacked. At the beginning the heroines were bold and immoral; the first pages blazed, the lines throbbed with subversion. Then, this heartbeat diminished, became a miniscule pulse which dwindled little by little, until vital functions shut down completely; halfway through, the heroines had been irrevocably transformed into psychological composites devised for the purposes of explication and the novel, which had appeared free and wild, preferred to frolic in an enclosure of highly limited significations where sex could be nothing other than a symptom, the sign of a void that needed filling, of an anguish to be appeased, of a slowly healing wound.” The way Jeanne’s indulgence in sex is, of course, portrayed exactly opposite to this as being about unapologetic pleasure and the purpose for it is solely her own.

That’s not to say sex is portrayed as an unproblematic activity in this novel. Men treat her in many different ways so she experiences their repugnance, gratitude, embarrassment, indifference or emphatic attention. There’s a kind of violence in how men project their desires upon her and also explicitly reveal their fears and insecurities in ways they scarcely realise. She also finds the more she engages in sex the more her desires evolve. Desire can suddenly well up within her to be expressed in unexpectedly bizarre ways such as the impulse to lick rain water off from a stranger’s wet anorak. Leger also considers the weird mental space we often enter into when engaged in sex so there is a charged interplay between reality and fantasy. So we see from Jeanne’s perspective how “The room rhythmically disappears and appears” in a way which is surreal.

For some time, rather than seeing men she explores a range of sex toys and pornographic videos as she explores the different contours of pleasure. There’s a risk that sex will become such a habitual activity it becomes entirely meaningless. Some sections take on a hallucinatory feel as her physical surroundings meld into an anonymous mass: “Jeanne watches and the details blur; colours wear away; sounds lose their meaning; the volume flattens; movements fragment; bodies exist no more”. In this absence we feel Jeanne’s emotional strife as the activity of sex turns into sheer chaos and she comes perilously close to becoming no one at all “no more memories, no more body that belongs to her, no more reasons or causes”. We’re left wondering if this is liberation or a nightmare.

There’s an old adage that novels need their characters to overcome a conflict and change during the course of the story for it to be successful. Jeanne doesn’t change in that by the novel’s end she’s engaging in exactly the same kind of practices that she is in the beginning. But what’s changed is that she and the reader are more aware of assumptions being made about her and the expectations that are placed upon a sexually active woman. We can feel the will for her to stop this activity and concentrate on being a wife or mother or business professional. We’ve become so accustomed to sex being used as a tool or a means to move into a different stage of life that it’s very difficult to view it as just another instinctive human function. The reader is given no insight into Jeanne’s life outside her sexual pursuits or the meaning of her activity because it’s nearly impossible for us not to ascribe her actions to a larger false narrative about her being.

It really surprised me how this novel brought me to this conclusion and made me feel so emotionally engaged. Quite often when reading novels which intentionally withhold details about their central characters’ identity or shield us from the heart of the protagonist I’m left feeling cold and dissatisfied. As much as I admired the intellectual engagement found in novels such as “Outline”, “Satin Island” or “First Love” I didn’t feel as much as I wanted to from them. But this novel made me feel a lot because I sympathised with Jeanne’s struggle to maintain a sense of integrity alongside her sexual proclivities. The novel also challenged a lot of my own assumptions and the way I might feel inclined to ask someone who engages in casual promiscuous activity if they will ever “settle down” – as if its natural or necessary for everyone to eventually become domesticated.

There’s a fine tradition of literature that considers sex in a frank and often shocking way – especially in France. Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye” self-consciously broke every sexual taboo by portraying every perversion imaginable. But the world has changed a lot since that novella was written almost one hundred years ago. Now every twisted sexual impulse can be viewed online in a quick keyword search. Leger’s novel says something much larger about how both our desires and our bodies are segmented and compartmentalized. No doubt “The Collection” will immediately put off a lot of readers because of its explicit content and its refusal to straightforwardly reveal Jeanne’s emotions. But this novel is saying a lot more about how we live now than other modern literature which shyly skirts around such inflammatory subject matter.

The Collection is about a woman who is sexually liberated and basically has loads of sex.
If I have to be honest, I could not finish it, as while I was reading it I kept getting distracted and confused.
The premise of the book is good, and the writing style as well, but I was definitely not enjoying it. Maybe it's the translator's fault, but I just couldn't muster the willpower to finish it.

This book missed me. I can see, in the distance, what it is meant to be, what it is meant to evoke, but for me, it sailed over my head - too cerebral for me.
Reminds me of Fermentation by Angelica Jacob, or The Fermata by Baker - using sexual connotations as the brushstrokes of a larger and more weighty idea.
Read if you enjoy the higher planes of fiction - the dream sequences, the stream of consciousness, the giant metaphors. Its not for readers who just enjoy the 'simpler' story novels.

This had some excellent and deep moments of writing and some more that were just meh. The premise was really promising and had some great potential but the actual product did not really deliver. The writing was good but I did not really care about the characters that much. It just felt half finished and a bit empty. I finished this and went 'okay, what now?' as it did not leave an effect on me.