Her earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French.
Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
Bordas has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.
At Electric Lit the author tagged seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill, including:
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWittRead about the other titles on the list.
This contemporary classic might not need introduction, but I’ll go for it anyway: narrated in turn by Sibylla and her young son Ludo (an absolute prodigy capable of reading ancient Greek and doing advanced calculus at age 5), it is perhaps the most fun novel ever written about the nature of intelligence. Sibylla is extremely smart herself, but can’t always keep up with her son, who’s constantly asking her to teach him something new. Yet her lessons are like magic tricks: when Sibylla teaches her son to read ancient Greek, we learn alongside him, and are entertainedthe whole way through. The book is smart and hilarious (Sibylla is very judgmental) without ever condescending to its reader. It assumes we are as smart as it is.
In its second half, Ludo goes on a quest to find a suitable father for himself, and the volume of lessons drops, but other types of learning come into play. Namely, he starts hearing a lot about games (chess, bridge), and there is this line that I find absolutely gorgeous in its simplicity when it comes to explaining what teaching is, and what its limits might be:
“When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rule to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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