This book is really something. So many great things happen in this book, but I felt almost lightheaded with surprise and delight when Frederick Wiseman suddenly appears to tell the author she should talk to Mickey Mantle, who knew Barabra Loden when she was a dancer at the Copacabana. Leger meets Mantle at the Houdini museum in Scranton, where he is a regular visitor, and he talks about, among other unexpected subjects, Houdini's spiritualism, Melville and Proust. Also, this quote by Celine to illuminate Wanda's final shot: "When you've reached the very end of all things and sorrow itself no longer offers an answer, then you must return to the company of others, no matter who they are."

My review of this was published in Music & Literature here: http://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2015/3/10/nathalie-legers-suite-for-ba... ( )

I was reading Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, marvelling but drowning in its Jewish American grandiloquence, wondering where the plot, to the extent that it might be said to have a plot, was going. So I decided to take a detour reading a short book, translated from French, about an actress I had never heard of, Barbara Loden, who was married to Elia Kazan (I had heard of him), had directed one full length film, Wanda (which is apparently a cult classic), and who had died of cancer in 1980.
The book tells this story, but is unsettling, in a good way, as it alternates between auto fiction of Nathalie Léger, biography of Barbara Loden, description of Wanda and the true story upon which the film is based.
I am at a loss to comment further on the impression this short book made on me, other than to recommend that you read it yourself, and say that I am going to read Léger’s other two books which form a loose trilogy. ( )

Pretty incredible. ( )

I knew nothing of Barbara Loden or her film Wanda before buying this book. I bought it because I buy and love everything Dorothy, a publishing project, publishes. My local library happened to have a copy of Wanda. I watched it, then read this book.

Wanda is a fascinating film, and Suite for Barbara Loden is a brilliant exploration of it. Léger's book is part critical analysis, part biography, part memoir, fluidly shifting between modes. Léger walks the reader through the film, patiently describing the scenes, and alternating these descriptions with the story of her commission to write a short encyclopedia entry on Loden and her film. Léger throws herself into a research program more suited to a complete biography, even traveling to sites where Wanda was shot. She is frustrated by obstacles along the way, such as not being able to gain access to Loden's papers, but these obstacles lead to insight.

Some of the most compelling parts of the book have to do with the relationship between Loden, actress, writer, and director, and the character of Wanda, the identity between them despite their differences, how as women they both negotiate a kind of disappearing act under the pressure to be the object of men's desires. Is Wanda ever free of this nothingness? Does making Wanda liberate Loden from this pressure? The answers aren't simple or definite. Along the way, Léger brings her own experiences and those of her mother to bear on these questions, making this book one of the most gripping explorations of art and identity, of fiction, biography, and autobiography, I have ever read. I will certainly be reading it again and perhaps teaching it in the near future. ( )