Yvette Benavides, the host of "Book Public" speaks with Camille Bordas about her story collection, One Sun Only.
Camille Bordas is a novelist. She writes in French and English and is also a literary translator.
Her most recent novels in English are “The Material,” and “How to Behave in a Crowd.”
Her story collection, One Sun Only, is diverse and wide-ranging, featuring stories published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
The stories in the collection are quiet and contemplative. However, each one turns in moments with an action or a character’s utterance or interior monologue that can leave us breathless.
Bordas’ characters are observant. They also have a self-awareness that makes them very perceptive —and yet they remain lonely. They are introspective — and yet they might say the wrong thing—sometimes even when they know it’s the wrong thing. They can’t quite help themselves.
Bordas is known for writing about family dynamics, about children and parents and the people that we can let into our lives momentarily because of proximity or necessity — or because that’s just the way their luck goes.
There’s a dark humor in the stories, an absurdity that is wry and witty. But there is also the kind of humor that is really just a spark of total recognition or resonance that leaves us shaking our heads in wonder.
There are no giant explosions here. The explosions are deadly small in fact. That is, they are small and quiet, and they come upon us in unexpected ways. Even for their smallness, they can still leave the character in a chasm of grief, in the throes of a sharp desire — or even an old, blunted one that can be as devastating. The tiny moments turn on a giant and universal idea that all of us can recognize or have considered at one time or another — about love, life, art, death.
Guest: Camille Bordas, author of One Sun Only.
