Sandra de Vivies

La femme du lac

The Woman From the Lake

January 2, 2025

First Novel

144 pages

140 × 205 mm

18 €

978-2-3662-4967-5

While browsing a Berlin flea market, a woman stumbles upon a box of anonymous photo negatives. Drawn in by their shadows and contrasts, she begins a meticulous investigation to uncover their origins. In one image, she notices the silhouette of a woman—and imagines her life under the Nazi regime, shaped by a culture of control, performance, and ideological conformity.

What begins as a historical inquiry quickly becomes personal. The narrator questions her own sense of difference, her past feelings of social alienation, and what drew her to this unknown woman. Are contemporary societies truly free from systems of categorisation and exclusion? Or do they simply impose new forms of normality?

Through a delicate blend of narrative, reflection, and visual meditation, Sandra de Vivies explores how individual identities are shaped—and sometimes erased—by the forces of ideology. A powerful and original work on memory, image, marginality, and the politics of visibility.

Rights sold in Dutch

The author

Sandra de Vivies is an author based in Brussels. She works in the field of writing about a repopulated reality, formally borrowing from both narrative and poetry. In particular, she experiments with different protocols for uncovering narratives through photography (contemporary or archival), at the juncture of literature, the humanities and dance. She published a first collection of these “photosensitive narratives”, Vivaces, with Éditions La place in 2021, and several texts and photographs with Éditions Wildproject and in the magazines Sève, Boustro, Le Journal des Poètes, Hurle-Vent, Pourtant… As an extension of her writing and research practice, preceded by fifteen years’ experience in journalism and publishing, she designs and runs writing workshops.

Highlights

This is the first novel by an author who is already well established in the field of literary creation in Belgium, where she has completed a number of residencies (Passaporta, etc.) and runs writing workshops.

Somewhere between a narrative and an investigation, this text examines twentieth-century European history and the way in which individuals are conditioned by authoritarian regimes, especially women.

A sensitive piece of writing that perfectly interweaves different historical strata and questions the notion of normality and the possibility of “deviant” trajectories in societies where the quest for efficiency continues to dominate.