Suzanne and Louise

by Hervé Guibert
Suzanne and Louise cover
Good Books rating 4.38
Technical:
  • ID: 471
  • Added: 2025-09-12
  • Updated: 2025-09-12
  • Reviews: 4
Reviews
4Columns · Leslie Camhi · 2024-12-06
haunting 4.25

The work is a disquieting, intimate portrait blending memory, fantasy, and fact, revealing complex sisterly dynamics and the eerie beauty of aging and care.

Leslie Camhi highlights the delicate and haunting nature of Guibert’s photo novel, emphasizing the nuanced portrayal of his great-aunts as enigmatic figures whose advanced age and personal histories unfold without clear markers. The review draws attention to Louise’s ascetic past and the intimate yet sometimes unsettling dynamics between the sisters, with Suzanne’s concealed secrets and Louise’s devoted care creating a layered narrative that transcends simple biography. Camhi appreciates the way Guibert resists easy categorization, portraying the sisters with a mix of tenderness and complexity that invites readers to experience their lives as a mysterious, unfolding landscape.

Quick quotes

    He is careful not to pigeonhole his great-aunts and resists—until close to the book’s end—assigning a specific number to either woman’s age.

    Louise’s memories... bear witness to her strange, obdurate delight in mortifications of the flesh, marking this “saintly” woman as an unwitting bedfellow to de Sade and Sacher-Masoch.

    Suzanne’s childless marriage... had concealed its own secrets.

Aperture · 2024-11-15
profound 4.75

The photo-novel is a candid yet staged exploration of aging, desire, and mortality, where the act of representation becomes a way to confront death.

The Aperture review focuses on the profound themes underlying Guibert’s work, particularly how it challenges the invisibility of old age and the tension between candidness and artifice in the portraits. It highlights Guibert’s meditation on mortality, noting the recurring presence of death as an invisible but central figure in the narrative. The book is seen as a complex interplay of fantasy and confession, where photography serves both as a means of intimate revelation and a talisman against finitude, making it a deeply moving and conceptually rich work.

Quick quotes

    Guibert tells the tale of these women and offers glimpses of their lives, defying their idea that ‘old age isn’t presentable.’

    The book’s first image... is a clue that, rather than an immodest divulgence, Suzanne and Louise is a choreography of privacy, revelation, and performance.

    The fourth protagonist of this singular work... is death itself.

The Paris Review · 2024-11-01
intriguing 4.00

This review emphasizes the reclusive and enigmatic nature of the two sisters, highlighting the novel’s blend of photographic and textual elements to capture their isolated lives.

The Paris Review presents Suzanne and Louise as a unique hybrid of photo-novel and memoir, focusing on the sisters' solitude and the intricate dynamics of their relationship. The review underlines the evocative power of Guibert’s combined use of images and narrative to create a layered portrait that is both intimate and elusive. It captures the tension between the sisters’ withdrawal from the world and the author’s persistent attempts to document and understand their lives, making the book a compelling study of family bonds and isolation.

Quick quotes

    Originally published in 1980, Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters—one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier.

    Mixing his writing with his photos, Hervé Guibert crafted a unique 'photo novel.'

    Suzanne, the older one, controls the finances. Louise, a former Carmelite, serves as her humble, tyrannical maid.

Apollo Magazine · 2024-01-29
melancholic 4.50

The novel is a melancholic and bravura exploration of complex sibling relationships, blending observation with the author's increasing role as a participant and director.

This review appreciates Guibert’s unique narrative approach, where he starts as a detached observer but gradually becomes an active participant in the sisters’ lives, even directing their interactions as if staging a performance. The emotional distance between the sisters, their jealousy, and their ritualistic relationship with the nephew is portrayed with a mix of intimacy and estrangement, underscored by Guibert’s candid and sometimes perverse photographic desire. The work stands out for its emotional complexity and the way it blurs boundaries between reality, fantasy, and performance.

Quick quotes

    They perform, for him, a dramatisation of their relationship. They seduce him; they are jealous.

    He casts himself as director and stage manager, sending letters to Suzanne in which he professes his ‘dream… to photograph your body…’

    After showing them the portraits he’s been taking, he coaxes Louise into undoing her tight Germanic braids, hair cascading forth in a way that feels shockingly intimate.

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