Lucie Elven

Lucie Elven’s The Weak Spot came out in 2021. She is at work on some short stories.

Unblenched: Homage to Brigid Brophy

Lucie Elven, 21 March 2024

It’seasy to imagine Brigid Brophy at London Zoo, making notes on the animals. I can see her by Berthold Lubetkin’s disused elliptical Penguin Pool or watching the apes. Two of them

used the full extent of the cage as a cubic area: their chases went also up and down, and up and down diagonally. Sometimes they shewed boredom, the consequence of play, and would fret for a moment;...

At​ the start of María Gainza’s first novel, Optic Nerve, the narrator, an art critic who is also called María, shows a couple round a grand house in Buenos Aires. She is wearing a soaking wet dress and a pair of fluffy slippers. She tells us with some self-deprecation that her job is taking rich foreigners to see private art collections. On this occasion, she had been...

At Tate Modern: Cecilia Vicuña

Lucie Elven, 13 April 2023

The child​ is made of unspun wool, ripped linen in a tubular hollow, rope unlacing from its braid, knotted gauze and sleeves of protective net pulled apart into rows of diamonds, as tall as the hall. Some strands pool on the floor, others drift overhead. At the other end of the room, the mother is more elaborate: her strings twist around ladders; plant fibres form wheels and trapezes....

When he arrived​ at the meditation retreat, a little south of Paris, Emmanuel Carrère was warned that he would be working with powerful psychic energies. ‘If for some reason you decide to leave mid-session,’ he and the fifty other men present were told, ‘you’ll throw the others off, and above all you’ll put yourself in danger.’ A noble silence...

From The Blog
6 May 2022

The news that François Mitterrand had a ‘long romance’ with the pop singer Dalida, confirmed by her brother this week, didn’t come as a surprise – my hairdresser told me as much several years ago. By 1998, eleven years after her suicide, Dalida had eclipsed her lover: a public poll to identify the most influential French person of the last thirty years had her at number two, second only to Charles de Gaulle. But abroad her allure faded, perhaps because she inspired awful biographical materials. A curse seems to hover over those who try to replicate her on paper or celluloid.

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