New Prose — Patrick Autréaux
now in Asymptote Magazine
“A couple more treatments and it would be over.
They repeated it to me at every session. Difficult to know what it could mean. Daily life had gradually been dragged down into a uniform exhaustion.
Chemotherapy washes out so much, dulling even the colour of your eyes, everything left languid by how it sucks away at you; you become a distended, pale form, mouth straining towards the gloom. Just as it painlessly plucks out your hair—the absence of pain making it almost more terrifying as you feel yourself dissolving alive—it ends by tearing you from everything, everything falling apart within it.”
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My translation of Patrick Autréaux’s ‘New Prose’ is now online in the July issue of Asymptote.
Click here to read.
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Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Survive; Verdier, 2013). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux (The Husband) will be published by Gallimard in Spring 2025. Dans la vallée des larmes is available in English as In The Valley of Tears published by UIT Books, and his essay A School of Life appeared in Socrates on the Beach (Issue 9). Recently, Pussyboy (Verdier, 2021), a novel about an erotic passion, was translated to Spanish and published by Canta Mares.