something happens

Stéphanie Chaillou

Translated by Laura Mullen

Diálogos presents, this season, two compelling new books from France in the work of Sandra Moussempès and Stéphanie Chaillou, whose something happens, translated by Laura Mullen, is just released. If you find something happens haunting, as we did, you will be in good company:

Stéphanie Chaillou’s something happens is a haunted chamber work evoking fugitive psychic states rarely experienced on the page. It is a piece exquisite in its beauty—poignant and arresting in its dread and despair. A shadow world of childhood lived for a lifetime in intimations, now brought to English in a lucid and sensitive translation by Laura Mullen. There’s a terrible inevitability to the narrative as it obliquely works its way into our souls in unbidden, uncanny, indelible images and leads us to the place we sense we dare not go. 
—Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child

In Laura Mullen’s exemplary and fierce translation of Stéphanie Chaillou’s quelque chose se passe (something happens), the body is voided and duplicated in the same instant, a writing I want to keep writing with. Here, a muzzle fuses with a mouth, a headless girl turns her head. A woman and the house she’s living in are indistinguishable, an extended phenotype of girlhood itself. This is flesh architecture rendered in syntax that also does another kind of work, a mode I might describe as inhibitory, a pressure that builds.  

—Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart

something happens presents the purest mystery, that which is never defined. We meet a killer for hire who works for the pleasure of killing, a headless girl who nonetheless bites, and, by the end of the book, someone lies dead in a garden. You didn’t dream it, Chaillou tells us: something irrevocable has transpired, which will stay with us long after the final page.
—Ana Reyes, author of The House in the Pines