My Favourite by Sarah Jollien- Fardel

My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Swiss fiction

Original title – Sa préférée

Translator – Holly James

Source – Review copy

I was so pleased to get an email from an old PR connection about this book as Indigo Press has just brought some real gems out in the recent past, so this book was longlisted for the French Goncourt prize and won the Swiss version of the prize. I was also interested after reading it. One of the other prizes it won was a prize for books read by prisoners! Sarah Jollien -was born in a village like the main character in this book and fled to live in Lausanne; she is also a volunteer at a battered women’s society. She has also been a journalist for 30 years. This is her debut novel and multiple prize winner. The book is set in the 1970s in a small Swiss village in the mountains.

My dear friend. As we were leaving Mass, I’d heard those words, spoken by Dr Fauchère, whom we deferentially referred to as The Doctor’. The Doctor was one of the few people in our village back then who had a degree. That morning, Gaudin the butcher had given the Doctor a little bow on the church esplanade. Dr Fauchère interrupted his conversation to say: ‘Morning, my dear friend.’ How elegant those words sounded coming from his mouth. That warm smile, just the right amount of politeness and restraint. I saw how that ‘my dear friend’ gave the speaker an air of importance and made it clear to their interlocutor that they were not of the same rank. In a gentle, subtle way. So I decided to be bold and say it myself: ‘My dear friend.’ My father was not an educated man, but he had that instinct bad people and animals have.

She saw the Doctor as a man she could trust how wrong she was.

My only memory of the ’70s and Switzerland is Hedi, which we had on Tin the UK. This is the polar opposite of that romantic view of a mountain village. This is about the fear of silence when people can see what is happening but do nothing. Jeanne has grown up seeing both her sister and mother suffer at the hands of her father. So when he finally turns on her when she is 8 she decides she will go to the one man she seems to trust, and that is the village doctor, hoping with the power he has in the village of the one man with an education that people listen to she opens her heart about the violent attack of her father. Still, when he does nothing, her world looks set until she escapes to a boarding school and then later in life, after a brief return to the village, she finally gets to Lausanne a big city and feels invisible there as she recounts those years of her fathers abuse the effect the loss of a sister that was the fathers favourite that he did an unspeakable act. Her mother is caught in a catch-22 situation around her husband, and his violence is no escape. This is what you do about the monster at home.

Was my sister trying to frighten the life out of us all with her sudden death, or was it just to frighten him? Did she think she could give us a wake-up call to change things?

Or was it that everything – being rejected, the abortion, the child that was never born – had plunged her into such a black despair that death was the only thing that could put an end to the pain? I can’t accept that dying is the only way to stop suffering. It’s too absolute. It means we’ve lost against our father. I can’t accept that I was incapable of saving her.

The loss of her sister another victim of her father.

This is a brutal book about a violent man, a father and a husband from hell. This is about the silence we can see attached to domestic violence in a small village. Everyone seems to know what he did, but like the doctor, there is a wall of silence, which makes it even worse. This is a survivor’s tale. I was reminded of the violent father in This is England when reading this book. If you do not watch the series This is England, it captures domestic violence and asexual assault brutally. This is a powerful novella, and like the other book I have read from Indigo Press, it has a powerful voice behind the writing. It is a book about the darkest moments and how to escape, but do you ever escape that violence? Jeanne is in Lausanne, but there is still a feeling of what happened in the past. Have you read a book about domestic abuse?

Winston’s score – A – This is near the top of the year’s books so far.