Surreptitiously Yours

by Kristin Fouquet

Claudette Laurence, a student of documentary film, believes surreptitious recordings are the only way to capture the truth. When she realizes she is being filmed without consent, her theory becomes obscured. As the concepts of privacy and ethics torment her, Claudette can only find the truth by confronting her fears.

122 pages, Paperback

Published March 16, 2016

About the author

Kristin Fouquet is a writer and photographer in the lovely city of New Orleans. Her short fiction and fine art and street photography have been published widely online and in print. She is the author of Twenty Stories (Rank Stranger Press 2009), a collection of short literary fiction; Rampart and Toulouse (Rank Stranger Press, 2011), a novella and other stories; The Olive Stain and other stories (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2013), an e-chapbook, and the print version, The Olive Stain and other stories (Le Salon Press, 2013); Surreptitiously Yours (Le Salon Press, 2016) a novella; Surrendered Stories (Le Salon Press, 2019), a collection of short stories with companion photographs; The Repertoire (Le Salon Press, 2022), a novella; and Fleur Royale (Le Salon Press, 2023), a novelette.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surreptitiously Yours is one of the books you don't want to end. I found myself reading slowly, putting it down though I could have read straight through in a few hours. I was captivated from page one. Each character is incredibly real and still a mystery. This book left me wanting more. So until Ms Fouquet gives us another novella I will most likely reread her previous publications. Love this book!

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, dark, brilliant, twisted, mysterious! I adored Surreptitiously Yours—homage to the gorgeous, decadent, quirky, and anachronistic world of New Orleans, the city where I grew up. This novella is for readers who love words and aren’t afraid of the dark, and this one is quite dark. It is a coming of age story as well as a noir thriller murder mystery and a love story with gothic elements. And I admired protagonist, Claudette, also known as Claude, for the way she views the world and for her refusal to surrender to the latest technology, all thanks to her grandmother Lillian, the dancer and snake charmer, who raised her in a free and bohemian fashion. I always say I can’t stand fiction that takes place in the present day because I read to escape from the world of cell phones, blogs, and social media and generally to eschew the slick, contemporary, superficial world we live in. Kristin Fouquet has managed to do it, to write a beautiful contemporary work of fiction that is none of those awful things. However, the contemporary theme of surveillance and the right to privacy is explored here. Is film student, Claude, the hunter or the hunted? Do any of us have a right anymore not to be captured on camera? This work is gorgeous, disturbing, and thought provoking, all of the qualities that make great art. In fact, I read this book mostly in one sitting because it was so compelling I couldn’t put it down. All of the details of New Orleans (not cheesy or cliche here, which is hard to do) were so real and so immediate that I felt as though I could reach out and grab them, and I have been feeling painfully homesick lately. Bravo, Fouquet! I highly recommend this one.

[Ames Holbrook · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the pleasures of picking up a Kristin Fouquet book is you know what you’re going to get… and you have no idea. Before you read the first page, you can bet on memorable characters, beautiful showcasing of New Orleans, and narrative propellant that doesn’t let you put the book down. SURREPTITIOUSLY YOURS gives you all of that. And, at the same time, it utterly surprises you with stunts and curves that Fouquet hasn’t shown you before. Fouquet has never written like a mainstream commercial author (said with highest praise), which makes it all the sweeter that, with SURREPTITIOUSLY YOURS, she gives us probably her first high-concept hook: our appealing protagonist films people without their knowledge or consent, even as somebody else is secretly filming her. Fouquet’s strength, in addition to great writing, has long been her characters and her settings, and those have always been more than enough to pull a reader in. This time she gives us those and a driving plot to boot, with magnetic threads involving snakes, opium, mysterious cash, inescapable camera lenses, a robbery scheme, two-way cross-generational love, one-way infatuation, double-team sexual domination, and some first-class deviants to carry it all out. As shot through Fouquet’s twisted yet trustworthy lens, SURREPTITIOUSLY YOURS is her most enjoyable book yet, with a healthy amount of humor to accompany the sinister turns, a precision of language that has the book punching well over its 122-page weight, and an ending loaded with payoffs. Five stars.

[Penne Laubenthal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the city of New Orleans herself, the stories of Kristin Fouquet are mysterious and strange, sultry and sensual, and often violent. Her works are rich in innuendo and yet as spare in detail as a minimalist painting. Nevertheless, Fouquet allows the reader to see beneath the surface into the tormented lives of her characters, lonely figures whose exteriors belie the anguish of their souls. Her characters wait, often in vain, for years for the connection that will assuage their loneliness.
In her most recent book, Surreptitiously Yours, Fouquet, who writes with a photographer's eye, chooses as her protagonist a photography student named Claudette who "surreptitiously" films her subjects in an almost desperate effort to capture the unadulterated realness of their lives. Watching and being watched, seeing and being seen, become leitmotifs in this novella. Both Claudette and Fouquet are influenced, implicitly as well as explicitly, by photographers such as E. J. Bellocq and by film noir. Claudette videos only in black and white, and Fouquet's work is an arrangement in grey and black.
In Surreptitiously Yours, lives are shrouded in shadows and unspeakable acts take place behind damask drapes. The hunter becomes the hunted in this tale as twisted as a live oak tree. To say more about the plot would be to reveal too much and that is something that the city of New Orleans and its denizens would never do. It is up to the readers, the viewers as it were, to see for themselves.

[Nate Briggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claudette Lawrence doesn't seem to be that much of a wallflower - but seems to be mildly confused about a lot of things outside her friendly old house. Perhaps that's because her social circle is so small - or perhaps because she grew up under such unusual circumstances.

One way she's trying to bridge the gap between herself and the workaday world outside is secret videotaping: a camera peering through a hole she's torn in a big shoulder bag that she hauls around the streets of New Orleans. (Later she learns that a smartphone will do the job of recording strangers in a more elegant way, but the metaphor of the "secret eye" is woven all through this narrative, so it's understandable that she starts out with an arrangement that's so clumsy and unreliable).

In any case, Claudette's confusion is about to increase as she abruptly loses a close relative, collects the attention of a rather incompetent stalker, begins a romance with her professor, and tries to figure out what's happening with the two dominatrices who live upstairs.

The chief issue with this book is that the city of New Orleans - the heat, the food, the reckless atmosphere - definitely takes a backseat to Claudette's fascination with herself. Things happen - although it doesn't feel like much is happening, since Claudette always comes back to herself. Because of this lack of external perspective, the narrative also feels a trifle incomplete, although reasonable people can disagree on that. [Nate Briggs for the Kindle Book Review]

[Jelena Vencl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A charming eerie noir/romance novella; a real page turner. I enjoyed the atmosphere a lot. And a beautiful book cover!