Lili is crying by Hélène Bessette
French fiction
Original title – Lili pleure
Translator – Kate Briggs
Source – Personal copy
I wish Fitzcarraldo would add the classic list to their subscription service as I keep missing ones that grab my eye. I am not someone that keeps up with publisher list as much as i did ten years agowhen I would knoiw which books were coming out hiere and there but no in the last few years life has got in the way I still pre order a certain number of books and have subscitpiuons with publishers I like such as Fitzcarraldo I may not read every book but I know the quality of there editors and trust them. So Helene Bessette is one of those French writers that, in some ways, slip under the radar in the English-speaking world. She was caught in a fight between French publishers when her first book came out, and she was championed and signed by Gallimard, where Raymond Queneau loved her writing. This book came out in 1953
— Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, sever-ances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death, says the shepherd.
He is driving his sheep down the stony footpath that edges the garden beneath the ruined towet set high on the parched, barren hillside, bleached white in the Provençale sun.
– Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, sever-ances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death.
The mistral is up.
Pale blades of wheat sweep the length of the dusty track. The serried sheep press forward and behind them, the shepherd.
Invisible rain, warm and soft, sinks into the dust.
And the mistral to carry it away.
The open tower a silhouette against the low cloud hanging through it.
A wind swirls. A block of wall crumbles.
The opening page and this made me think of Beckett
This book is a heart-wrenching tale of the lengths a mother will go to stop her daughter from finding happiness with her lover, and instead devote her life to her, as she had always wanted. But it is how we get this; it is like the prose has been edited by Samuel Beckett. It is a book of sharp statements of Lilli, a woman broken by her mother’s actions. Charlotte, the mother, runs a school, and there is something of Jean Brodie around her the way in the book she makes her daughter think and act with a combination of praise and scorn classic controlling behaviour. It is a story of a fragile girl’s heart breaking as the romance she is trying to have is broken. A chorus of those surrounding the two is also woven into the story.
Hello!
With my zip-up bag.
Hello, Maman.
– Here is my daughter, returned to me, says the mother Charlotte.
My lost daughter.
My found daughter.
My daughter who runs away with her zip-up bag.
Here is my deceiving daughter.
My cheating daughter.
Who has no qualms about telling me silly stories and lies.
— She left me, says the mother Charlotte.
She’d left me.
She was gone.
And what in heaven’s name did I do to deserve being abandoned by my own daughter?
Did I merit such punishment?
If only my arms could stretch up to the blue sky and shake those clouds.
For Iloved her so much (my daughter).
She has let me down.
I have been disappointed in love. And what a love!
I still love her, naturally, Ilove her just as much as I ever did.
Only now there’s a fresh scent of disappointment to add to the burden of that love.
She was everything to me.
My life, I lived it through her.
I feel this captured the manipulative and Brodie-like nature of the mother Charlotte
When a writer was championed by Queneau, you know it isn’t going to be a writer that is challenging to the reader; this book is it: she cut everything she could get away with, so all that remains on the page is pure emotion, bile, dark humour, and a twisted relationship. I was reminded of how, like Jean Brodie, the mother struck me that mix of praise and disdain Brodie had with her girls, the way she manipulated them. It is a story we’ve seen many times before: the domineering mother controlling their child is a classic storyline, really. WHat gives this legs is the style of the book it is hard not to think of eckett the clipped and brutal at times of the prose is very luike him this would make a great stage show it is so powerful and it is all in the way she controlled the tone and style of the vpices in the prose and how wonderful it has been brought to us in English by Kate Briggs. Although Barbara’s work was missed, both Bray and Wright were French-translated writers, and both were in similar circles to Bessette, particularly Barbara Wright, who translated Queneau around this time as well. The sad fact is Bessette died in poverty and largely forgotten, even in France. We are lucky there are 13 novels she wrote out there for us to hopefully discover when translated into English! This book means I have 10 books left before I hit 200 French novels under review on the blog! Also a great pick for Woman in Translation month; I’ve not seen anyone mention the book much on social media.
