This Sunday, fans of Isabelle Huppert will be rooting for the French film star who's in the running for a best actress Oscar, which would be a stirring followup to the best actress Golden Globe (in a motion picture, drama) that she won last month.
Huppert is the star of Elle, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, a psychological thriller directed by Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct). The movie is based on the book Oh... by Philippe Djian, which was originally published in France in 2012 and won the Prix Interallié.
Early on, Oh... was translated into English, but the translation, done by Michael Katims, was commissioned by the man who had bought film rights and hasn't been published here--until now. On May 23, the Other Press will release Djian's book in paperback with the title Elle ($15, 9781590519158).
Like the movie, the book is a harrowing tale: Elle centers on Michèle Leblanc, the character played by Huppert, who, as the novel begins, is raped by a man in a ski mask in her home a few weeks before Christmas. In the month that follows, when "memory, sex, and death converge at every turn," as the publisher puts it, Michèle, who is the head of a film production company, suspects most of the men in her life, including her ex-husband; her lover, who's married to her best friend and business partner; a married neighbor she flirts with. (Not suspects are her son, who kidnaps his wife's baby, who was fathered by another man; her own father, who's serving a life term in jail for having killed 70 children 30 years earlier; and her mother, who has lovers half her age.) Eventually Michèle learns the identity of the rapist, but rather than report him to the police, she engages in a brutal, sexual game with him that eventually spins out of control.
The French magazine Inrockuptibles called Oh... "the most crazy, feminist and politically incorrect novel" of the Rentrée Littéraire of 2012.