Michèle Bernstein

2013

Book, 19 cm x 14 cm, 155 p, language: English, published by Book Works, London, ISBN 978 1 906012 52 6.
Materials: ink, paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/869).

Literary synopsis

‘La Nuit [The Night] is about the Paris of 1957 – the one I see when I close my eyes (the nostalgic note). There’s no need to cry, it’s still there. We can piece together the image from the scattered pieces of the jigsaw. And if La Nuit is a love story, it’s not for him, or for her, or for someone else, or for me. It’s a love story, a story of lost love, for the streets.’ – from the new preface, Michèle Bernstein

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Michèle Bernstein was a founding member of the Situationist International. Following All the King’s Horses, The Night was also written for cash, and again cannibalises the plot of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, featuring the same characters as her debut: Gilles, Geneviève, Carole and Bertrand. The story remains the same, but the book is different, this time parodying the style of the nouveau roman, with its elongated sentences and non-linear sense of time and place. As its protagonists drift through the streets of Paris, through the entanglements of a ménage à trois, and the ennui of a summer holiday on the Côte d’Azur, The Night is littered with détournements – unattributed quotations and knowing winks at situationist practices – and clues that give insight into the lives and spirit of both the author and her husband Guy Debord. With a new preface for the English edition by the author, The Night has been translated by Clodagh Kinsella, and edited by Everyone Agrees, and designed by Erik Hartin, as part of a project with After The Night, a détournement of La Nuit, set in London, 2013. Everyone Agrees are a collective who operate and publish out of London and New York.

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