Unable to access Loden’s journals, the narrator writes scene-by-scene descriptions of Loden’s single film, 1970’s Wanda, interspersing these with scenes from her own investigation, which brings her to New York, Connecticut, and “soot-stained” Pennsylvania coal country, where Wanda was shot. Accordingly, Léger eschews the brief encyclopedia assignment, instead structuring the text like a musical composition in which certain notes sound again and again. Asked to write a short encyclopedia entry about the American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, Léger’s narrator becomes “carried away,” unable to stick to the basic, established facts of Loden’s life, or even to what appears “imperfect, individual, accidental” about her subject. In Léger’s associative, meditative novel, what we can know of one another is whatever we can imagine.
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