Joy Sorman on the Belgian art-brut studio behind her new novel
In an interview with Le Monde, the French writer discusses "La Vie brute", built from months spent in a Belgian center for outsider art, alongside a neuroatypical artist named Irène Gérard.
Joy Sorman has told Le Monde that her new novel, "La Vie brute", grew out of an extended stay in a Belgian center for art brut, the tradition of untrained, outsider art. There she came to know Irène Gérard, a neuroatypical artist whose presence in the book anchors Sorman's account of the place.
According to Le Monde, the novel continues a method Sorman has refined from book to book: spending long stretches immersed in a single setting before writing about it, letting the place and its people shape the narrative rather than imposing one on them.
Je ne deviendrai jamais une artiste sauvage comme Irène Gérard
Joy Sorman, interviewed by Le Monde
Le Monde frames the remark as a measure of distance: Sorman writes about a world of raw, untutored creation without claiming to belong to it herself. The interview does not detail further plot elements or publication specifics beyond situating the book within this year's rentrée littéraire coverage.
Sources
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