... elegant, focused prose, fluidly translated by Natasha Lehrer ... With admirable restraint – another author might have been tempted to veer off into disquisitions on De Sade, Balthus, or Nabokov – Springora describes how Matzneff expertly manipulated her into believing she had as much agency and power as he did.
... shocking ... As in a fairytale, Springora lets the narrative unfold with horrid inevitability. It is compellingly awful to read through modern eyes. How can the lamb be allowed to wander off with the ogre? ... I confess to laughing aloud in places: Springora can be darkly hilarious ... rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity — and beautifully translated — has done what it set out to do. I hope it helped her to write it.
Consent is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury ... That feeling of fatedness is reinscribed by Springora the shaper of this tale, who begins the book with references to fairy tales, imagining Snow White refusing the temptation of the shiny red apple, Sleeping Beauty resisting the spindle — impossible, the tacit message ... The fallout has been swift. After the publication of Consent, prosecutors opened a case against Matzneff. He was dropped by his three publishers and stripped of a lifetime stipend. This week the government announced it would instate 15 as the age of consent. By every conceivable metric, her book is a triumph.
Both a captivating story in its own right and an account of how the pride of French culture—its worldliness and its respect for the arts, in particular—made it corrupt and craven in the presence of a predator ... Springora herself was adamant about her own desires at the time. Matzneff loved her and she loved him and he was the man she was determined to lose her virginity to; to deny this misbegotten passion would be to oppress Springora herself, as her mother saw it. Eventually, their relationship, which lasted two years, became an open secret, and Matzneff was often a guest for dinner at Springora’s mother’s house ... No! Yet despite such moments, Springora is not, for the most part, all about the drama. Her memoir has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways. Where an American memoirist might emphasize the trauma she’d endured under the influence of this imperious older man, Springora is not particularly interested in her status as a victim or in finding an official psychiatric diagnosis to define them both, an authoritative superstructure to establish control over their shared narrative. She’s not content with merely reclaiming her own story, the story Matzneff stole, along with her childhood. She’s gunning for his story, too ... Springora is not sorrowful and suffering; she’s pissed off. She’s sarcastic and derisive on the mystique surrounding Matzneff’s alleged genius. She demolishes what remains of his literary reputation by illustrating that it’s an edifice built of lies and vanity, with himself the Mary Sue at the center.
Springora’s style is incisive and she keeps readers hooked with short chapters depicting a post-1968 libertarian establishment that lets her down ... Springora’s testimony is important for several reasons. Her forensic account of G’s approach and grip over her life will serve as a warning to parents and adolescents. She also delves into the ambivalence of her feelings. She admires and loves G, but she also senses that she is being used.
[A] lucid and nuanced nonfiction account of the emotional and societal ramifications of the sexual relationship Springora had, some 35 years ago, with celebrated writer Gabriel Matzneff, when he was 50 and she was 14 — a relationship that isolated her from her peers and left her psychologically scarred into her adult years ... Consent does not reveal much about Matzneff that was not already known. Indeed, its story is precisely about how much was known that was considered a private matter rather than a societal problem ... Springora’s measured and persuasive account recreates the tone of her young self’s emotional ambivalence, even while her present-day narrator condemns years of collective inertia in tackling the problem of child sexual abuse ... Strikingly, Springora’s work, with its nuanced ambivalence, shows the value she continues to place in literature, which gives experience a mode of expression in which every voice has its place and where moral judgment is not always the ultimate arbiter.
... a devastating literary takedown of another powerful man ... eloquent ... Springora’s prose, smoothly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, is spare and novelistic. She is a graceful stylist, though her story also burns with a sense of purpose, a clarifying force. Her ravishing descriptions of the restlessness and boredom of teenage life rival those of Françoise Sagan ... Her cool, precise account reveals his grand seductions as the brutal, petty, narcissistic fumblings that they were ... [an] act of revenge. What makes [it] so satisfying is that the writer takes over the story, turns the tables, goes from being the fearful to the feared, the controlled to the controlling ... These are stories that are hard to tell even to ourselves ... excellent.
Annabel Lyon cleverly peels away the layers to reveal the sins of the supposedly 'healthy' sisters. She is unsentimental and writes with blistering honesty. Consent, which has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is the most truthful exploration of sisterhood I have read since Fleabag.
Springora’s account can be regarded as an act of testimony; as such, it is an important addition to the ever-growing documentation, mainly provided by women, of sexually abusive behaviour on the part of powerful men ... I find her lack of curiosity about earlier [sexual] political battles disappointing ... Of course, the politics and the theories of 1970s France are not Springora’s primary concern, and her excursion into this territory is tangential. For the most part, Le Consentement is composed as a work of literature; it is the story of the sexual exploitation of a vulnerable adolescent girl by a narcissistic monster. Although the story happens to be true, its truth does not exhaust its value ... The book’s self-presentation as a work of literature leaves Springora’s reader uncertain about what she is entitled to ask or expect. The aesthetic gain is apparent: un récit magnifique. On the other hand, Vanessa Springora’s decision to place actual events in a novelistic form sometimes feels too convenient, a strategy for avoiding a deeper, more critical engagement with the culture in which she grew up, and which made her book possible.
... a deeply disturbing, yet crucial reckoning from this brave survivor of egregious child sexual abuse ... It’s astonishing to read such a lucid, straightforward account of the widespread collusion of Springora’s mother, as well as friends and acquaintances, and the many contemporaries of G, who did nothing to stop a pedophile, who had the audacity to brag about his conquests in widely lauded personal journals ... Springora has managed to exact some revenge by capturing G, and all of his terrible behavior, forever in these erudite, incriminating pages.
Springora’s story is literary in the simple sense that writing features heavily ... Springora’s stylised, folkloric narrative befits Matzneff’s formulaic perversion ... The self-dramatising instincts of the young V are compounded by the almost ostentatious storytelling of Springora the adult author. The memoir is built from discrete episodes – remembered scenes – that are either literary or sexual, often both. The marshalling of experience into a montage of telling incident is a feature of most storytelling, but it is so rigorous and heightened here that it can feel that selectivity and order – two of the principles that distinguish life from literature, and make literature out of life – are being fetishised ... The ruthless literary economy also issues in a psychoanalytic neatness that at times becomes lifeless ... A connection between V’s absent father and her vulnerability to G’s predations is drawn repeatedly and sometimes heavy-handedly ... a driven, efficient memoir, and the story of Springora’s recovery from Matzneff’s multifaceted abuse is also the story of her discovery of the will to write about it, and so of the making of its author. Yet to write about literature is not necessarily to produce it.
... evokes a certain time and milieu ... The story has been told before, by Nabokov, among others ... The suspense in Consent comes from waiting for someone to step in ... [Springora's] contempt is cool and sardonic and the prose spare ... This isn’t a misery memoir, or an account of survival against all odds. It reads like a dark fairy tale ... Alice has fallen through the looking-glass. I can’t help but cheer her on. Matzneff’s legacy is now enmeshed forever in this clever, thoughtful and honest book.
... a short book, but it unpicks just how little the notion of consent means when there’s no equality ... This book – sensitively translated by Natasha Lehrer - would be devastating at any time, but now it’s part of a movement in France against the generation of ’68, for whom 'the freedom to f***' (Mme Duchamel’s words) was absolute ... Now the day of reckoning has come. Consent could just as well be called Backlash.
Vanessa Springora’s memoir, Consent, is a troubling reminder that our horror at the idea of sex between adults and minors is relatively recent, and dependent on shifting cultural attitudes ... [a] frank account ... Consent is not a comfortable read, but it is immensely powerful, both in showing how a victim can regain control of her own story, and in considering how such men might be held to account.
Though Springora advances an intriguing theory about who wrote the anonymous letters, she offers little proof. But she is an elegant and perceptive writer whose austere prose resembles that of her compatriot Annie Ernaux ... A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way.
... piercing ... In elegant prose, Springora corrects G’s fictions of 'mentorship' in telling her story while shedding light on the devastating aftermath. This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned.
