cover image Ingrid Caven

Ingrid Caven

Jean-Jacques Schuhl. City Lights Books, $13.95 (250pp) ISBN 978-0-87286-427-6

A real-life German cabaret singer and film starlet is the title character in Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Ingrid Caven, a semifictional 2000 Prix Goncourt winner about the vagaries of 1970s European counterculture. Caven, former wife of German filmmaker Rainer Fassbinder and live-in partner to the self-styled ""Parisian dandy"" Schuhl, floats in stream-of-consciousness reveries, many enhanced with too much cocaine and LSD. She remembers dutifully singing ""Silent Night"" to Hitler's troops one snowy Christmas night and roaming New York City entranced as an adult. Schuhl's staccato yet contemplative prose (trans. from the French by Michael Pye) illuminates celebrity excesses against a decadent and violent world backdrop.