Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory

¿A luminous book. A poignant literary work.¿¿Alessia Ricciardi, Northwestern University
¿A remarkable sequence of meditations on memory and identity, presence and absence, the said and the unsaid, from one of the most significant and original writers in Europe today."¿Ian Blyth, University of St. Andrews
¿An affecting novel about how the heart¿an organ that doesn't just bleed, but reads and writes¿is given and taken, and the scars it bears."¿M/C Reviews
Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University¿s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same.
Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous¿s fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the ¿omnipotence-other¿ seductions of literature; a family¿s flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.
Hélène Cixous is the founder of the first Women¿s Studies program in France, at the University of Paris VIII. Since 1967, she has published more than fifty ¿fictions,¿ as well as numerous plays and works of criticism. Her many books include Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, ¿Coming to Writing¿ and Other Essays, and The Portable Cixous.