Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories

A Natalie Portman Book Club Pick

＂Sinewy, tough, sharp . . . Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.＂ --Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic

From the award-winning and bestselling French author Colombe Schneck, a woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming

At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.

In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.

Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych--fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.

Colombe Schneck is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, she has received prizes from the Académie Française, Madame Figaro and the Society of French Writers. The recipient of scholarships from the Villa Medicis in Rome and the Institut Français, as well as a Stendhal grant which allows French writers to do research and write abroad, she also spent fifteen years as a broadcaster for Canal Plus, France TV and Radio France. She was born in Paris in 1966 where she still lives, is a graduate of Sciences Po and Université de Paris II with a degree in Public Law.

Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among other publications. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.

Natasha Lehrer is a writer, translator, editor, and teacher. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Frieze, and other journals. As literary editor of the Jewish Quarterly she has worked with writers including Deborah Levy, George Prochnik, and Joanna Rakoff.She has contributed to several books, most recently Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism. She has translated over two dozen books, including works by Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Amin Maalouf, Vanessa Springora, and Chantal Thomas. In 2016, she won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She lives in Paris.