Category: france

Lili is crying by Hélène Bessette

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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.

Repatriation by Ève Guerra

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Repatriation by Ève Guerra

French fiction

Original title –  Rapatriement

Translator – Clodagh Kinsella

Source – Subscription book

If you have been around the blog the last year or so, you will know. I am a huge fan of the books that Foundry Press have been bringing out; well, this is one of their recent books.  This book is a debut novel by Eve Guerra, a writer of Italian Congolese origin who had to flee Congo when the civil war happened when she was nine and grew up in France after she got her degree. She has taught Latin, Ancient Greek, and French.  She also has a regular column in Lire.  She has also written poetry.  This is her debut novel. It won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, which is the prize from the Goncourt for the best debut novel in a given year. It is fair to say Eve seems to have drawn from her own life a little in this book, as the main character has a similar Congolese, Franco-Italian background to the writer herself, who also lives in Lyon.

Even as a child I dreamed about leaving. I made up my

mind when I was eight, one afternoon in April 1998.

It was the dry season. We lived in Congo-Brazzaville, somewhere in the bush where the light no longer enters.

When people ask me what village I’m from, I say the bush. A house, a birthplace, the bush again, the bush full of sapele trees on the banks of the river where snakes slither.

I’m not scared of them: I am one.

They say the Congo River is a giant python turned to water. It was Dieudieu, the village pygmy, who told me this. He said there was no need to fear those snakes, that they only attacked to defend themselves or feed, and I was already too big for those little things that drag themselves along the ground.

Thinking of her childhood and even then escaping

The book starts when Annabella, a 23-year-old woman trying to get by as a poet in Lyon, struggles to get by; actually, her world is shattered when she gets a letter saying her father has died in Cameroon.  Her father, a man she hadn’t spoken to in two years.  Had brought Annabella up after she was seven. Her father’s violent temper and wanting to have total control over his wife led to her mother running away, and Annabella spending the rest of her childhood growing up with her misogynistic father, a white man in Africa with money and all that brought him.  Annabella heads to Cameroon and is faced with the task iof finding 20000 francs to bring her father’s body home.  The book sees her wrestling with this as she also confronts the ghost of her own past and how she had fallen into books and learning, but this event also makes her think of one of the books she had read, Molloy, and she finally sees what the book is about.  We see how her father has tainted her relationship with her mother, where she treats her mother in the same violent way her father did.  Will she be able to sort it all out?

We divided up the tasks that evening. My aunt Alda had to call back one of my father’s colleagues, jot down numbers in her notebook, and make an appointment with the undertakers, ask for a quote. I had to contact the embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find a repatriation solution.

I spent the morning transcribing a list of phone num-bers, first the French embassy in Douala, who knew where the body was being kept. I waited for Clémence and Antoni to leave before I rang.

“I’m calling because my father is dead. The death took place on Monday, 29 April. And I was asked to get in touch with you. My name is Annabella Morelli.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli, I’ll put you through to the colleague handling the file.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli… Mademoiselle?”

Trying to find out how to bring her father’s body back home

Now it seems, after seeing an interview with the writer online, that the kernel of the book is an actual event that happened to her.  Her father too had died in Africa, and she was left with the same problem Annabella had, and that was finding the money to bring the body home.  Like Annabella, Eve is also someone who loves her literature; there are various books and allusions to classical texts in the book. She also, like Annabella, is closer to her literature than she is to her own family at times.  The book also looks at a father who used his ability to financially control the women around him, a colonial male, a violent man who wants his wife to toe the line he made completely.  The book is fragmented; it is like the past and present are blending at times as we see Annabella facing the ghost of her past and the effect her parents’ actions had on her as a person.  If you are a fan of post-colonial fiction with its effect on one family,  this is a book for you 1 Have you a favourite book about a father-daughter relationship?

 

 

 

 

Célina by Catherine Axelrad

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Célina by Catherine Axelrad

French fiction

Original title – L’enfant d’Aurigny (L’un et l’autre)

Translator – Philip Terry

Source – Subscription book

Next stop on this month’s Women in Translation month is another of the books I recently got from my subscription to the publisher Les Fugitives. I picked this as I loved the thought of the life of a servant, one of those unknown people remembered.  Catherine Axelrad has written a number of autofiction novels. also YA novels.  Also a pastiche of Proust.  She has studied Protestant theology after she had been a teacher.  And is now a minister.  The book came from a few notes in Victor Hugo’s diaries when he was in Guernsey. The pieces mentioned a name, Célina; this is her story.

I don’t remember my father’s face, and yet I was already six years old the day he went missing, along with the father of Philomène Grut, who lived in the house at the bottom of the lane and who went to live in France with her mother the following year. They had set out before dawn, as usual, and then when he’d got back the previous day I was already asleep with all the others, apart from the little one who my mother still kept by her side. But the Sunday before that he was at home and after dinner the weather was fine, he’d settled down outside to smoke his pipe and I’d come along to snuggle round his legs so that he would lift me onto his knees. My mother had said to let him be for once so that he could get a little rest the poor man, but he’d said that children didn’t bother him, otherwise I wouldn’t have made six for you, he’d added laughing, seven with the little lad upstairs. Is it you who made us, daddy?’ Id asked, pulling his beard, and he’d laughed more than ever, but I remember that mother scolded me, she said that I always had to go and blurt

The opening lines of Célina shows her life ?

A young girl with a life that, when she is fifteen, is not long after her first period and first sexual encounter.  Having lost a number of family members to suicide and the sea . She is then offered a way out of what seems a bad life. That is how to be a maid in a writer’s house.  The writer is Victor Hugo. She has a job as a maid in Hauteville House, as Hugo is both in exile and writing and bringing his unique Gothic vibe to the house. Over the course of the book, you see Hugo and Célina embark on a sexual relationship; this is taken from his diaries. It is a time of class and social rules, and this relationship is breaking them, but Célina is liked by the household.But this isn’t Hugo’s story; this is the story of her, the hard journey that a girl like Célina faces in her life. How the loss of certain family members can bring you to the verge of oblivion. How a job a relationship can change a narritve if only slightly.

Monsieur was very upset by this news; he made me take forty-eight francs in pounds sterling for the fund for the widows and orphans of shipwreck, and he asked me to tell him how my father was lost. What affected him most was to learn that the body had never been recovered. The bodies of the Pengalley crew were only found three months later, in mid-June. It’s said they were so disfigured that they could only be identified by their shoes.

Hugo and her

I liked this book; it is one of those books where it isn’t about action, but about big ideas. No, it is about one girl, her struggle, her life, a life of someone if hadn’t been for a few crumbs in Hugo’s diaries about his sexual relationship with this one maid and later on, when her death at a young age is mentioned, it is a short period of time, the five years he was on the Channel Islands. Her view of the relationship is with a sort of distance about what is happening between them, a woman damaged by her first sexual encounter . A life on the edge, a working-class life, when we never hear about the lives of those under the stairs. A glimpse into a world we never see from Célina’s point of view. I think of well-observed French novellas like The Silence of the Sea by Vercors or A Sunday in Ville d’Avray, mixed with Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs, one of the maids in the background of those shows or even the love affair in Gosford Park. Hugo is like Gambon’s character having sex with a servant. Do you have a favourite quiet novel or about a minor character from history?

A summer with Montaigne by Antoine Compagnon

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A Summer with Montaigne by Antoine Compagnon

French nonfiction

Original title – Un été avec Montaigne

Translator – Tina Kover

Source – Personal copy

 

I picked this as one of my summer TBR books because I had read it last year but hadn’t reviewed it. I still ned to read more than the couple of Essays from Montaigne I have read.  This book was taken from a series of radio essays that were done over a summer by the literary professor Antoine Compagnon, where each day over the summer a passage of Montaigne’s was read, and these essays were then read where he used his ideas to compare to the modern day to help maybe make people want to read Him. The series must have been successful, as he did a series about the French poet Baudelaire after this, and the series itself ran for a number of years, covering over writers and Poets over the years.

This is one of the most moving passages in the Essays; it is rare for Montaigne to talk about an event in his life, a private moment, in such detail. The story is about a fall from a horse, and the loss of consciousness that followed. “In the time of our third or second troubles (I do not well remember which), going one day abroad to take the air, about a league from my own house, which is seated in the very center of all the bustle and mischief of the late civil wars in France; thinking myself in all security and so near to my retreat that I stood in need of no better equipage, I had taken a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong. Being upon my return home, a sudden occasion falling out to make use of this horse in a kind of service that he was not accustomed to, one of my train, a lusty, tall fellow, mounted upon a strong German horse, that had a very ill mouth, fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and set on ahead of his fellows, comes thundering full speed in the very track where I was, rushing like a Colossus upon the little man and the little horse, with such a career of strength and weight, that he turned us both over and over, topsy-turvy with our heels in the air:

The fall from the Horse

So each of the forty short essays picks part of what Montaigne wrote about or stood for as a person; alongside this, we learn a little of his history from him,oving riding the acident he had and how this led to him spend the years he did in his tower, where he wrote the essays in a world were he read and wroote about his thoughts and his life.  From the first essay around engagement and how Montaigne hadn’t been so taken with the ideas of Machchiavelli when he read The Prince. Then through how Montaigne conversed with people and how he was a plainspeaker, not someone who wanted to stuff ideas into people.  Then about the horse and his fall from the horse, which is in his essays. To his obsession over the essays with Death from the fall on the horse to how we are all going to die.  What emerges from this is a desire to read Montaigne himself; the passion that Compagnon has for him comes through in the essays, but also in how, even after all this time, the themes and ideas he wrote about still have echoes in the present.

Death is one of the major subjects on which Montaigne ruminates, and to which he returns again and again. The Essays are also a sort of preparation for death, from the chapter “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” early in Book One to the end of Book Three and its final two chapters, “Of Physiognomy,” in which Montaigne praises the stoic attitude of peasants, who are exposed to the ravages of war and plague and yet remain as composed and tranquil as Socrates on the verge of drinking hemlock, to “Of Experience.”

His obsession with Death in the Essays

I loved this. I am a huge fan of radio essays. I spent a lot of my younger years listening to Radio Four and love the likes of Alistair Cooke and shows like Something Understood.  The series was broadcast with an actor reading a section of Montaigne that each essay uses as its source material.  The book is a great intro to Montaigne; I will be reading his essays in the near future. I have a feeling I will be looking back and cross-referencing Compagnon’s thoughts on the essays, but also, like he does, thinking about how what he wrote about touches us now.  Montaigne lived in a time of war, and we seem to be living in increasingly darker times. But I also think Europa have missed a trick by not doing the other books in this radio series; it seems every series has been published as a book after the summer. It would be an interesting collection to have.  Do you have a favourite series of radio essays or, even these days, podcasts ?

Monique Esacapes by Édouard Louis

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Monique Escapes by Édouard Louis

French Auto fiction

Original title – Monique s’évade

Translator John Lambert

Source –  Personal Copy

I think one of the writers whose books I have enjoyed, if that is the right word. But connected to him is Edouard Louis, whose books about his life are shocking yet also show how life can move on over time. I have read three of the five books translated into English so far, so when I was in Macclesfield last weekend, I happened to see this book on the shelf in Waterstones. I decided to get it because another thing about Louis’s books so far is that they are slim novellas that can easily be read in an evening. This is what I did with this book. I will hold my hand up, and this book had me crying it is a very long time since i did that. I’m not sure.  If the visit to Macclesfield, where my mother’s ashes are scattered, had raked up some memories about my relationship with my mum and my strained relationship with my stepfather.

The day after her escape, at eleven in the morning. I’d just woken up. I drank a couple of coffees and called her:

‘How are you today?

She looked like she was out of breath, as if she’d been running.

I’m still tired, but I’m okay. I slept a lot. I’m glad I left?

That reassured me; I’d started to worry again that she’d regret her escape and go back.

That had worried Didier too: ‘Now that she’s got the hardest part behind her, she needs to hang in there and not go back to that man. It takes so much energy to escape and break free that often, right when you’ve almost made it, you give up and go back.’

The hardest was leaving him, and it’s now a day later !

The book opens, and Edouard is on a writer’s residency in Athens when he gets a call from his mum. His mum has basically repeated the mistake of her past relationship with Edouard’s father and fallen in with a man who is a drinker but now is starting to abuse her and control her. She left her home to move in with the guy. Edouard knows this, so the book follows how, at a distance, he helps his mum get herself together, and he then helps her plan a way out of this situation. He connects to his sister, it turns out she didn’t like his book about their father, and they hadn’t spoken for years, but when he rang, they joined to help their mother.  We saw him return to Paris later in the book, and how it had empowered his mother; she was still friends with the man, but now on her own terms. The most touching section was when he invited his mother to see the staging of his book in Germany. His mother had never flown and was so proud of her son this evening.

The day of the performance and our trip approaches. She talks about it a lot and as we talk I become fully aware of all the dimensions of our imminent departure for Ger-many: my mother has never crossed a border in her life, she’s never seen a country other than her own, apart from one afternoon on a boat off the coast of England with her school, just a few kilometres from the port town in the north of France where she grew up, she’s never walked down a street and heard a language other than her own, she’s never been in contact with another culture, another civilisation, she’s fifty-seven years old and she’s never taken a plane in her life, she’s never seen the sky from the inside and the earth from the sky, she’s never slept in a hotel room, she’s never been to the theatre, except to see a few school plays when she was around ten or twelve, she’s never seen a real performance directed by a real director, of course, she’s never seen a show in which she’s the main protagonist, she’s never been invited to travel by an institution the way artists or politicians can be.

His mother did so many firsts on the trip with Édouard.

I think Louis is maybe one of the best writers at capturing the horror life can bring. Whether in the past his relationship with his Father or in this case the horror of the repetition of the past in his mother’s life. He shows how people can escape violence, and over the course of the book, we see Louis’ mother grow in confidence. This was the first time in her whole life she had lived by herself. The freedom to just do nothing and live her life on her terms shows a woman growing. As I say, I connected with this book on a personal level. The things I  should have said to my mother when she was alive about her world that haunts me still. If you liked his other books or books from the likes of Annie Ernaux, this is a male writer who voices his life like hers. Have you read anything by Édouard Louis ?

 

The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

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The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

French fiction

Original title – La Sorcière

Translator  – Jordan Stump

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to see Marie Ndiaye’s name on the longlist when it came out, as I have reviewed three of her other books over the years. She won the Prix Goncourt for her book Three Strong Women in 2009, but it was published 13 years earlier, in 1996.  I’m pleased to see her older books have been coming out. I have a few of hers to catch up on, but this is a book that shows how good a writer she was before the Goncourt win, a book about small-town life with a clever twist.  This is one of two books on the longlist with a witch theme.  This is set in a version of the near past where magic is still alive but hidden.

When we first came to this little city, two years before, I made the mistake of telling Isabelle about my powers, optimistically thinking I might try to initiate her, since after all nothing forbade passing the gift on to women who weren’t my daughters, and because Isabelle seemed a person of some importance who, I thought at the time, 1 wanted on my side. She reigned uncontested over our little sub-division, her authority not founded in any store of objective virtues, for Isabelle was neither pretty nor intelligent, nor hardworking nor thoughtful, nor even subtly and perversely magnetic, but rather (that authority imposed as a historical fact, duly imparted from neighbor to neighbor.

Isabelle and her husband were the first to build here; from that arrival on the still-virgin land at the gates of the city she’d drawn the need to serve in some sense as the memory of us all, we who were appearing from all over the region, and even the country. It was from Isabelle that we learned what had to be known of this or that neighbor’s ways to keep from upsetting the general entente of the neighbor-hood, and should anyone attempt to break off with Isabelle so she wouldn’t come barging in several afternoons a week she made it clear that she would turn the entire subdivision against them with her unscrupulous gift for gossip.

Her powers were small but she told the town gossip

This is a book about family secrets and small towns. It happens that the witch’s nature in the book adds a clever twist. It is about being a mother and a wife in a loveless marriage.  At the heart iof the story is the split between the parents, Lucie and Pierot.  He is very controlling of Lucie. They have twin daughters, Maud and Lise, who are just at the cusp of becoming Teens.  Their mother, Lucie, is from a line of witches, and at this age the girls must discover whether they possess the clairvoyant powers passed down through the family’s female line. Will they bleed tears of blood, a sign you have the power, and will they have it more than their mother, who can only see things in the present moment, not inj the future?  What happens when their powers initially seemed like their mothers’ but over time grow, and the tears come? What happens is a story about secrets, the family’s past, other family members, as their gifts grow over time , and a mother trying to keep it all together. As real life and the surreal world of magic blend into one.

My father opened his big arms wide, and Maud and Lise, delighted by this display, rushed gigglingly toward him. I was surprised to see the gray streaks I knew so well dyed a bluish black that contrasted with his brown hair.

And on top of that he was tanner, thinner, he now had a certain dandyish, youthful elegance, but when, with overplayed enthusiasm, he ordered Maud and Lise to gallop through the rooms—and they launched off with a sound of furious hoofbeatsI saw that he seemed worried and jittery. He grabbed me by the shoulder and, in the tone he probably used to talk business in his Rue de Rivoli of-fice, he beseeched me to return, as quickly as possible, the 120,000 francs hed recently given me on the occasion of his promotion. Then he dropped onto his new couch, red leather, sueded, and added, avoiding my eye:

They Lucie parents as they discover more about the girls powers

I love Ndiaye’s writing style. She has twisty sentences that draw you in as a reader. This is a tale that blends the everyday with the fantastic in a small-town setting. A mother who struggles when her daughters have more power than she does is both a common tale of mothers wanting daughters nearby and a story about daughters having the chance to go further than their mother has because of their powers. It sees what happens when the daughter’s eyes are opened to the full scale of the powers and how it can change their lives, and what about their selfish Father in all this?  I was pleased when this arrived it was the last book I needed when it arrived and the one I most want to read when the short list came out as I am a fan of Ndiaye this is a book from a writer growing not a polished as the other books I have read but they are twenty years older this was her early on in her writing career and great to see a book that mix the everyday and a pinch of magirc realism all that and a tale of a family at a crossroads due to the twins powers and what it means for their mothe Lucie and them themselves!

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

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The Deserters Mathias Enard

French fiction

Original title – Déserter

Translator – Charlotte Mandell

Source – Subscription edition

One of the benefits of having a Fitzcarradlo subscription in recent years has been knowing I may have a couple of books that make the International Booker longlist and are in with a chance at least.  They publish so many great books in Translation.  So when this made the longlist, I was happy as I hadn’t got round to finishing his last novel after reviewing a number of his books.  It was nice to step back into his world, which is uniquely his. Enard has a writing style that is all his own. His books all vary.  Still, they are all well-written in various styles,s and this is an odd little gem.  It turns out this book was being written as the Ukrainian war started, and that led to the second narrative in the book, which follows a deserter from the war.

Angel, my holy guardian, protector of my body and soul, forgive me for all the sins committed on this day and deliver me from the works of the enemy, despite the warmth of the prayer the night remains a beast fed on anguish, a beast with breath of blood, cities in ruins full of mothers brandishing the mutilated corpses of their children faced with scruffy hyenas that will torture them, then leave them naked, dirty, their nipples torn with teeth under the eyes of their brothers raped in turn with trun-cheons, terror stretched over the country, plague, hatred, and darkness, this darkness that always envelops you and urges you towards cowardice and treason. Flight and desertion. How much time is there left to walk? The border is a few days from here, beyond the mountains that will soon become hills of red earth, planted with olive trees. It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers, you know the region, you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow, the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

There is a poetic touch to the Deserters story

As i said the book has two story lines they are seperate maybe at some point you could say the characters in each book have been in the same place the first story uses a point in history to look back in time that is 9/11 and instead of being inj America it follows an event that is happeniong on that day on a boat in Berlin there is a conferecnce i=on a Mathmatematician Paul Heudeber, One of the think I found is was this a real person it wasn’t but a mix of various figures that had walked a similar path and that was breinbg looked up for being against the  Nazis   Still, with his mind, he was in Buchenwald and opted to head to the east after the war.  We are learning about his life alongside his daughter, who is trying to find out more about her father: he was a mathematician and a poet. She didn’t know himmeanwhile the other story follows an unnamed man that has ruin off from war a deserrter as he finds a woman and a donkey in a hinterland of scrubland the beauty oif this mis the lack of place and time was it a event that has happened ort is going to happen as I say there isn’t much that runs in between the stories just the aftermath of war in different times and places and how it lays bare peoples lifes.

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Summer seemed to be wavering. The willows were still green, the days still warm, but a freezing fog would rise from the river before dawn and immense clouds seemed to be gliding over us, from the distant Baltic.

Our floating hotel had left Köpenick east of Berlin very early in the morning, on Monday. Maja was always alert, spry. She would go up to the top deck to walk, a stroll between showers, deck chairs and deck games. The green domes and golden spire of the Berlin cathedral captivated her, from afar, when we arrived. She was imagining, she said, all the little gilt angels leaving their stone prison to fly off into a cloud of acanthus leaves blown by the sun.

The water of the Spree was sometimes a dull, dark blue, sometimes a glowing green. During the preceding weeks, all of Germany had been rocked by storms; their aftermaths swelled the Havel and the Spree, which usually were quite low at summer’s end

We navigated through the swirling water.

the conference on the boat

I am a huge fan of Enarrd.  This book is an odd tale.  It is easy to see, with a panel of judges that includes two Mathematicians, that a book featuring a fictional Mathematician would make the longlist.  But the second narrative inspired by the Ukraine war shows the horror of war on the mind, the need to escape war, the way it affects not just the Soldier but also the woman and her donkey.  People may dislike the lack of detail in the story; in fact, they may think it is l lazyStill, forr me it is a brilliant touch of not placing that narrative in a place or time and thus making the story work now, in fact, with the Iran war, how many men and women are wandering out of the scrublands of Iran, lebabanon or the Gulf states it is weird how a book is maybe more relevant than when the longlist was announced a clever mix of family, war, the horrors of war lose and all this brought together by one of the best living writers Enard. Do you have a favourite book by Enard?

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

French Memoir

Original title –Triste Tigre

Translator – Natasha Lehrer

Source – Personal copy

I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to this book sooner. I usually keep an eye out for books that have won the major book prizes across Europe as a guide to those that, at some point, we may see in English. Winning one of the various prizes associated with the Prix Goncourt usually means the book will reach us in English, so this book has won not just the Goncourt for books read by high school pupils; it still amazes me what great books have won that prize, and it also won a woman’s book prize in France. The book uses the writer’s own experiences from the age of 7 to 14, when she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

You like that? Yes, yes you do, you really like it.

The title is Lolita but Lolita herself is almost entirely absent. You see her through the filter of her predator’s gaze, and she almost never exists as herself; she is the perfect fantasy figure, the nymphet incarnate. At last, at the end of the book, Humbert the dreamer recognizes this. As he sits in the car he has deliberately driven off the road, waiting for the police to pick him up, he has a final epiphany. He recalls the morning when he was driving around the country trying to find the teenage runaway. Lost on a mountain road, he stopped the car. Looking down from the hill to a small town below, sounds floated up toward him like a choir: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolitas absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita and her own life shows the darker side of that book

But in writing this book, she wanted it to be more than a book about the rapes. That’s when she was just seven and carried on until her mid-teens, all in a cottage that the family were doing up in the Basque Country.  But what we get is a book that shows the impact of these events on her from her youth through her life. The abuse suffered over those years from her stepfather, a man who loved the music of French rock star  Hailday and played it loudly. I could picture this hippy rocker it brought chills of my own stepfather a man that still had a fifties style rocker hair and would even as I write this sends a shiver down my spine not that I was sexually abused but over the years after my mum has died, I see the sheer mental and trauma he has caused both me my brother and in a lot of ways my mother by his personality and ability to gaskight us all anyway. I was connected to her life and to those men who slowly or violently tear apart lives . How lives get put back together and how books connect us to both our past and to think about how it is a prism to view the past, and here we see the rapes as a child and the impact on her. The book is part literary criticism, part cleansing, part sheer horror.

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in dark-ness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment. I didn’t understand what was happening, but from the first moment, I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, one that needs to be held to keep it from getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he, too, was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Virginia Woolf, who was abused by her two half-brothers, describes the bizarre experience of those first pawing caresses in an autobiographical piece in which she is trying to find a relationship between her old memories and the way her still-developing personality was being formed: … as I sat there, he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand touched my private parts.

THE first time he touched her  and how similar events effect Virginia Woolf

I read this book in nearly one sitting. The book has an almost-thriller feel and a non-linear way of describing her life, but it is so compelling that you hang on. Every word on the way she talks about the events but also the way she wants this book to be more than just that, as i say it is about the books she loves the title is a nod to the poem of William Blake elsewhere, Lolita is mention her mothers grief for a lost boyfriend that in some way blind her to the events that happened. THE book has other little events though her life, like how she got her name and how unusual it was at the time when most names had tpo be from an approved list of names in France. The book will appeal to fans of the autofiction of Ernaux and Louis. Still, for me, it has something more in common with writers like Kluge and Ester Kinsky, especially in its non-linear, polyphonic narrative style at times. Plus, it is a book I guarantee you won’t want to put down, which sounds so wrong given the subject matter, but it is so well written !!

Have you had a book that has hit you for six, so to speak ?

The other girl by Annie Ernaux

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The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

French memoir

Original title – L’Autre Fille

Translator – Alison L. Strayer

Source – Personal copy

I always talk about how it is like returning to a piece of gossip or a great story from an old friend, reading a book by Annie Ernaux. This will be the eighth book I have reviewed on the blog. The first was in 2014, back before Fitzcarraldo and before the Nobel win. Anyway, when this fell onto the doormat at Winston Towers, it was short enough for me to just read it that day, which I did, in fact, read twice over two days. As ever, she opens up about her life. In fact, this isn’t just her life; it is a corner of her parents’ life and a secret they thought she had never known about the other girl, the earlier daughter they had before her.

It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a yellowed cardboard folder, showing a baby posed in three-quarter profile on a heap of scalloped cushions. The infant wears an embroidered nightdress with a single, wide strap to which a large bow is attached, just behind the shoulder, like a big flower or the wings of a giant butterfly. The body is long and not very fleshy. The legs are parted and stretch out towards the edge of the table. Under the brown hair, swept up in a big curl over the protuberant forehead, the eyes are wide and staring with an almost devouring inten-sity. The arms, open like those of a baby doll, seem to be flailing, as if the child were about to leap from the table.

Below the photo, the signature of the photographer (M.

Ridel, Lillebonne), whose intertwined initials also appear in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, which is heavily soiled and coming unglued.

When I was little, I believed – I must have been told –

that the baby was me. It isn’t me, it’s you.

There was another photo, taken by the same photogra-pher, of me on the same table with my brown hair pulled up in the same sort of roll, but I appear to be plump, with deep-set eyes in a round chubby face, my hand between my thighs. I don’t remember ever being puzzled by the – obvious – differences between the two photos.

It opens as she sees photos of Ginette

I can see why it took this long to write this well, 14 years ago, as it means most ot the people in her family that may have been upset about her writing about this were gone. The book sees her looking back at the other girl, the other siste,r the ghost sister that she never knew about, Ginette, the sister who had died many years before Annie was born it was one day in the shop her parents’ old shop, that she caught a brief conversation between her mother and a regular customer about the other girl and how she was nicer than her what other girl. Over the years, she gets a little bit more of other family members; nothing more of her parents, but later she finds pictures of Ginette years before she was born. This is one sister trying to find out about the other girl, the sister who died of Diphtheria many years before she was born. Something she should have had if they had known. An epitaph for a girl she never knew, but has maybe haunted her, and what her mother said about her being nicer than the other girl.

I cannot put an exact date to that summer Sunday, but I’ve always thought it was in August. Twenty-five years ago, while reading the journal of Cesare Pavese, I discovered he’d committed suicide in a hotel room in Turin on

27 August 1950. I immediately checked – it was a Sunday.

Since then, I’ve imagined it was the same Sunday.

It grows more distant every year – but that is an illu-sion. There is no time between you and me. There are words that have never changed.

Nice. I think I already knew that the word could not be applied to me, judging from the terms my parents used each day to describe me, according to my behaviour: bold, scruffy little madam, greedy, Miss Know-It-All, nasty girl, you’ve got the devil in you. But their reproaches rolled off my back, so sure was I of being loved by them, the proof of which I saw in their constant concern for little me, in addition to their gifts. I was an only child and spoiled on that account, always at the top of my class without making any effort, and in short, I felt I had the right to be what I was.

When she heard what her Mother had said in passing

This is what she does so well, or as the Nobel committee said, for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. She looks and takes apart her own past. A ghost of a sister in these forty pages is there. She never knew her. These are the breadcrumbs, the watermarks, the dust of a child that died, and maybe had she not, would Annie have been Annie? They always say life is stranger than fiction, and time,e and time again, Ernaux shows us this in her writng. Her art is the art of self, of family, of the secrets every family carries in its background. This is a short book, not even fifty pages, but it hits hard and is one I will be rereading for many a year.

in the uk you can buy this book via this link 

 

 

The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

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The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

French Fiction

Original title – Les Belles Images

Translator – Lauren Elikin

Source – Personal copy

I’m finally back. This may be a shorter blog than usual, as I read this over a month ago and had intended to review it sooner. However, with all that has happened, it’s just lovely to sit back behind the laptop and write a review of a book. This is the second book from de Beauvoir I have reviewed in recent years. This novel is from later in her writing life. It is hard to capture her life in what is usually my brief introduction to the writer. I have read she had such an impact on both French literature and philosophy, and in that very French way, is also tinged with scandal. I think my next book will be from. Her book will be one of the non-fiction books. Have you read her books or this book, even?

Laurence thinks of the king who turned all he touched to gold, even his daughter, who became a resplendent metal doll. Everything she touches turns into an image. Wood panelling: where urban chic meets the poetry of the forest. Through the leaves she glimpses the water, blackly lapping; a boat passes by, searching the banks with its white gaze. Its light splashes on the windows, brutally illuminating the lovers walking arm in arm, a flash of the past for me, just as I am now the tender image of their future, with the children they might guess are asleep in the bedrooms at the back of the flat. Children will feel as though they’ve climbed into a hollow tree, in their delightful bedroom with natural wood panelling.

An idea worth considering.

Lawrence thinking early on in the book a perfect life !

What I loved about this book, even though it was written in the late sixties, is that the narrative and themes of the book are maybe more relevant now than they were when the book was written. The book focuses on Lawrence, a high-flying female ad executive. From the outside, she seems to have it all. Her architect husband, Jean Charles, is perhaps the most modern and shallow, prioritising style over everything. She also has two children. The book has a turning point, and that is when her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, points out how unfair she feels their world is to others. This then leads Lawrence to question her life and the choices she has made.  Consumerism, climbing the ladder to the perfect life, often comes at the expense of family time and other priorities. As 2e all know, de Beauvoir was a well-known Feminist. This is a book about what it means to be a woman, a mother, successful, and all that entails.

The merciless gaze of children who refuse to play the

game.

  • I help Papa support us. Thanks to me, you can go to school and cure the sick.
  • And Papa?
  • He builds houses for people who need them. That’s also a way of helping them, you see?

(Horrible lie. But what truth can she tell?) Catherine remained bewildered. Why don’t we give everyone food?

Laurence had again asked questions and Catherine ended up talking about the poster. Because it was the most important thing or to hide something else?

Maybe the poster was the real explanation, after all: the power of the image. Two thirds of the world go hungry, and the face of the little boy, so beautiful, with big, big eyes and some terrible secret behind his closed lips. For me it’s a sign: the sign that the struggle against hunger continues. But Catherine sees a little boy of about her age who is hungry.

When Catherine questions her parents world !

 

As I read this book, one of the things that came to mind most was the book “Perfection” I read earlier this year, which featured a couple living the perfect Instagram life in the 1960s, wanting to be on the pages of the French interior magazine that was the vogue at the time. What difference do children make to this ideal picture, and also when, like Her daughter Catherine, they ask about the world as they question the unfairness in it? Especially now, as the divide in our society continues to grow year after year. We need books like this to be read, reminding us of the class divide at that time. However, this is also a feminist book about the female role in society, and that has significantly changed since the book was written. A high-flying woman like Lawrence would have been rare to know, but it is now much more common. Any, this is a book about the early years of consumerism and can still be read as a question about the perfect life. As I say, it had parallels to Perfection in that regard, but actually followed a different way of looking at breaking the cycle of the ideal life. Have you read either book?

 

The Collection by Nina Leger

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The Collection by Nina Leger

French fiction

Original title – Mise en Pièces

Translator – Laura Francis

Source – Library

I was planning to review another book today, but I picked this up last night and read it in an evening. At the start of this year, Women in Translation month, I visited the library and found a few books that I had maybe missed over the last while, and this was one of them. I think I may have seen this when it came out about six years ago, but it was one I never got to iut was the second novel by the writer, and it won the Anaïs Nin prize.In an interview, I read an interview with her, and she said she had written the book to subvert the male gaze to a female gaze of the geography of Paris. We follow Jeanne and her quests around Paris. She has taught novel writing as well.

Drowsiness, tender and shadowy folds, abandonment to torpor. Dilation, rising, elastic rigidity, too narrow in form to contain the new mass, compressed, veins protruding.

Jeanne maintains utmost concentration.

Her gestures are slow, diligent. She passes the penis between her fingers, into her mouth, presses it against her face. She examines it, occasionally putting it to her ear to listen to the blood beating, follows the curve of the head with her thumb, feels for the slit which drinks up her saliva.

She isolates the penis between her two cupped hands, excludes the body, and fixates upon the mobility of the organ that gradually fills the space. The furniture dimin-ishes, the details blanch out. She remains alone with the penis which she has made her own. Even her own body has lost substance.

One of the numerous meets this early on in the book

Now Jeannequest is a woman who likes men, and the book follows her with her numerous encounters with men. But also her view of the various men’s penis and the way they make love. I don’t know Paris well enough to grasp the travelling around, but she seems to make arrangements to meet and just have sex with these men, and the book is complete with how she positions her body in the sexual conquests. She is a woman who seems to rule over the men, and as we drift from the various hotel rooms, they end up in or even more or less discrete situations. Even on a trip abroad, she has sex. Burt, with her added commentary on the various men’s parts and the multiple shapes and sizes they come in. I laughed as the cover art is mushrooms of various size and shapes a sort of sneaky wink to the penises within the book!

It is in hotels that Jeanne finds the necessary elements to furnish her palace. She appropriated a doormat and some candlesticks from the Hôtel Saint-Pierre, net curtains from Timhotel, bedspreads from the Hôtel du Delta and the Hôtel Cambrai, some obsolete ashtrays and two bedside lamps from the Hôtel de Nice. The palace is an exquisite cadaver of the Parisian hotel trade.

Jeanne passes through her domain in the evening, at bedtime, in the morning, upon waking; she roams around it between appointments, in the midst of loud dinners where conversations stream out without spilling a drop onto her, in the crystalline sharpness of the beauty counters in department stores, under the halogen bulbs of waiting rooms.

Sometimes, she interacts at length with a particular penis. Attentive to the fidelity of the memory, she approaches, observes, drinks in the details. Hours pass in slow meanderings and interminable pauses until she leaves the room, reluctantly, careful not to disturb the stillness of the forms.

Some of the hotel next I am in Paris I will see these hotels and think of this book

I think this is an excellent book as it is a very positive view of a female that would otherwise be looked down on by a male writer or made to seem a real man if she were a male bed jumping. She has changed the sort of sexual dynamic, and the men she is sleeping with get described like I have seen many a woman years ago when I used to read people like Roth, etc. But this has that French sort of normality to the numerous sexual acts. This is what would happen if Anne Eernaux were sex mad and sleeping with lots of men. Add to that the way she captures the male penis in it, in many strange and different styles, and how each one in her own way makes Jeanne approach in a certain way, it is like a guide of how she tackled these men and the style and techniques she used. The various rooms and types of men she met all this as she criss-crossed Paris to meet in various Hotels. Have you read any of her books?

The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur

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The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur

French fiction

Original title – L’Enfant qui,

Translator  Bill Johnson

Source – personal copy

I picked this up earlier in the year when I went to Cambridge for a holiday. I picked it up because Le Fugitives has been one of my favourite publishers over the last few years; they have been bringing out some excellent female writing, initially from French authors, but I know they are now also bringing out English writers. Jeanne Benameur was a French professor before becoming a full-time writer. She has written both for adults and children. She also runs writing workshops in prisons, as her father was also involved in the prison service. She also works with children in distress, and that has fueled her literature. I obtained a lot of this information from her French Wikipedia page, which connects with the book, which is about a small boy who has lost his mother, father, and grandmother.

You’re running. You’re running. So no eyes should have the time to see you, so your face should not be captured by anyone’s gaze. How long has it been since your mother’s eyes last rested on you?

How long since there’s been no mother?

The calendar counts in days in months in years. But you, you don’t know. You live with only darker moments and brighter moments. In your head, time finds room for itself where it can, the way that space threads its way among the trees in the woods.

Sometimes you lose your mother’s face. You haven’t yet learned to find it in a faraway icon, near a blue blue sea, looking up tenderly in a painting of the Italian Renaissance. You’re thrown into a panic. I hear your breathing. It bumps up against something hard in your chest. You run you struggle against the hard thing in there, a rock. Between your ribs the air is constricted, it whistles. At such times you feel you’re still alive. From the pain.

In the woods away from the pain

This is a book that looks in on these characters and how they deal, or in the most part don’t deal, with the loss of a daughter, a wife and a mother. IT is mainly about the small boy, there are a few names and little place names or the time when the events are happening, but for me, that means it can be any time, and makes it feel like a tale for all. The small boy likes to wander off to the woods, and he walks with a dog. Is it a dog or an imaginary friend he has made? Maybe it is his mother, my Amanda always says robins are my mum visiting me when we see them ,checking in on me. A father who has moved on, the mother was a sort of ghost in their lives. The way she is described evokes the kind of things that evoke a person’s past, as well as a place, a time, etc. The mother is never fully present, but her spirit is. The boy struggles. I loved him early on as he was off, and his grandmother turned, expecting him to be just by her elbow, but he was gone. I think this is a book that touches the silence of death and tries to bring words to it.

The dog is trotting next to you. No one aside from you can see it, this dog.But you don’t know that. Its presence by your side sets my mind at ease. It’s strong, and can smell things that you can’t see.You can push ahead with your journey. Your woollen top always hangs down on one side, you’ve buttoned Monday with Tuesday, your grandmother says.You don’t entirely understand what that means. It’s just that the days no longer know how to follow one another.You’re a child who leans. The dog restores the balance.

At times a burst of joy moves through you. You don’t know where it comes from.It’s the morning lark that finds its rising flight in you. From your feet to your head and much higher than your head, an irrepressible surge lifts you up. There’s no reason for the joy. It carries you. And you move forwards.

In the wooods with the dog but it captures as I said silence in this world

I can see how the things she has done around her writing in prisons with distressed children have given her a real insight into how to make silence fly off the pages in words, something that is hard to grasp. But she also captures how we may remember someone who was never fully present; that spirit of the mother is still with me. I wonder if the dog was hers or just a way for the boy to be in silence and not always feel alone, if that makes sense. This book brings me to book 179 in my review of 200 French books, and it’s from one of the publishers that I feel has brought some of the strongest female voices to us from France. Do you have a favourite book from French? Favourite publisher that has brought out French books?

Just a little dinner by Cecile Tlili

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Just a little dinner by CécileTlili

French fiction

Orignal title – Un simple Dîner

Translator – Katherine Gregor

Source – Subscription copy

If you haven’t been following the blog for a while, you may not know that I am a keen fan of the new publisher, Foundry editions that have been bringing us a great selection of books from around the med and they all have a blue cover design with a motif in the design linked to the place the book is set this time it is Paris. This was the writer’s Debut novel and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in the section for Debut novels. There was a review of this book in The Times, which is great to see a small publisher getting coverage in a significant newspaper rather than the same few books that every paper, reviewer, and so on, has to discuss. But the reviewer mentions a connection between friends for them and this book. Well, for me, the mention of a dinner party brings back one memory, and that is the closed room drama that is Abigail’s party. Well, this isn’t quite as brutal as that, but as the reflection of Britain in the seventies, one could say this dinner party and its guests reflect the Paris of their day.

Johar walks in the twilight. She asked her driver to drop her off a few blocks away from Étienne’s building. She needs some air before getting cooped up for the evening. She walks slowly, in no rush to arrive at this dinner party she wasn’t expecting and is already finding annoying. She takes her time to inhale the heavy scent of this summer evening.

The avenues here are wide. There are windows with striped awnings swaying gently in the breeze. The rustling of the trees accompanies her footsteps and their canopy forms a protective arch above her head.

Here she is already on Boulevard Raspail, outside Étienne’s building. She sits on a bench and takes a deep breath. A few swathes of grey have appeared in the sky.

Gusts of wind toy with the dry leaves, warm blasts of air hitting her in the face. A thunderstorm is badly needed to break this late-August mugginess at last and wash away the day’s sweat and weariness.

As Johar heads to the dinner this sticky evening how will it end !

The dinner brings together two couples: Claudia, the hostess of the party, a timid young woman who is very nervous about the evening, and her partner. She is a physiotherapist. She has settled into a way of life, the way it is and isn’t ambitious. Her husband, Etienne, has invited Johar, a woman in the business world, driven and fast-rising, who is soon to be the big boss of the company where he works. In turn, Johar has brought her husband, Remi. But as they gather around the table, the course of the evening will see the two women reevaluate their lives as they all have secrets about what the evening is all about, with Johar turning a blind eye to her home life in a way. Is Claudia pregnant? How will the evening end? The tension is there as we see how each person has a reason for the evening being there or not wanting to be their, daydreaming about another woman.

Étienne won’t stop talking about pottery. Johar was hoping that her interest in the pomegranates would create a diver-sion, but he has gleefully grabbed this opportunity to describe his tastes, his travels, and his encounters. As usual, Étienne talks about himself. He briefly goes into the dining room, but before Johar can enjoy a minute of peace, he returns, carrying a vase with a delicate blue pattern.

“Here, look. Hold it. Does it remind you of anything?”

“No. I don’t know. Did it use to be on this mantelpiece?”

“No, no – I mean the pattern. Surely you recognise it?” Johar mechanically runs her fingers over the vase, following the geometrical outline of the turquoise stars. Étienne can’t contain himself any longer. “Nabeul. It’s pottery from Nabeul.”

Think we’ve all had a situation where we get drawn into talking about something else !!

This is a book about how we sometimes fail to express ourselves enough until it is too late, and how modern relationships have evolved. As I mentioned, this is a portrayal of 21st-century Paris and urban life through the lives of these four characters. Just as Abigail’s party captured the spirit of the seventies dinner party, it also explores how men and women interacted in the seventies. Each time I read a dinner party from the formal affairs in Waugh’s books to the post-war dinner parties of writers like Updike and Bellow in the US of those boom years. Through Abigail’s PART Y AND THINGS LIKE friends to a 21st century Paris, and four people with different agendas for the evening, and what is going to happen. This is a tight work that builds well into the evening, reflecting each character’s actions, feelings, and motivations, as well as what they are trying to achieve or hide. Ultimately, it is Etienne who brings the two couples together. It captures this generation’s view of dinner parties and how they interact, as well as their lives. Do you have a favourite book with a dinner party?

 

The Possession by Annie Ernaux

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The Possession by Annie Ernaux

French Fiction

Original title –  L’Occupation

Translator – Anna Moschovakis

Source – Subscription edition

This is the seventh book from Ernaux I have reviewed over the years the first 11 years ago in 2014 and by now her books to me have become like a letter from an old friend telling another snippet of there life over the years like a glimpse into her world every few months over the last 11 years. I plan to read all the other books I haven’t read over the years. But each is another picture of her fictional real life. Another view into her interesting personal life. Her personal life always seems a lot more colourful than my settled-down routine life, much the same as most people’s. She is that friend we all had with a life that looks pretty different from ours. I have never quite gone as far down the path of jealousy as she has in this book, which is a very slim novella, which sometimes has the feel of a detective novel without a crime, as she pieces together the picture of this unknown woman.

And yet I was the one who had left W, several months earlier, after six years together – as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up my freedom, reclaimed after eighteen years of marriage, for the shared life he so strongly desired from the start. We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time. He called me one evening, told me he was moving out of his stu-dio, he was going to be living with a woman. From then on there would be rules about calling each other (only on his mobile phone) and about seeing each other (no nights or weekends). I was gripped by a sense of disaster, out of which something else emerged. At that moment, the existence of this other woman took hold of me. All of my thoughts passed through her.

She had ended the relationship

SO, a few months before the story opened, she had finished with a man she had seen for six years, merely called W. The two seemed like they were at different points in their respective lives when they met. Ernaux was shortly out of her 18-year marriage, and W was a man who wanted to settle down with her it seems like they had grown used to one another after these six years, and she described their relationship as boring. So they remain friends, frequently talking and meeting. So when a new woman appears in W’s life. He tells her very few details; the rest of the book is haunted at times, but also, like I said at the start, this book has the feel of a detective novel. As she wants to know more about this new wom an in his bed does she grab his cock the way she did. What is her Job? How old his she? All these breadcrumbs fall off the plate as she builds a picture of her. Is she near when she walks near where she lives? Is that here with similar hair on the metro she sees? The book sees how regret, obsession, jealousy, and wanting to know who had replaced her position in W’s affection.

When for some reason I had to go into the Latin Quarter – the part of Paris, other than the avenue Rapp, where I ran the highest risk of running into him in the company of the other woman – I had the uncanny feeling that I was in a hostile environment, being watched from all sides. It was as if, in this neighbourhood which I had filled with the other woman’s existence, there was no room left for my own. I felt like a fraud – to walk down the boulevard Saint Michel or the rue Saint Jacques, even when I had good reason to, was to expose my desire to run into them. With its vast, accusatory gaze bearing down on me, all of Paris punished me for this desire.

As she views the places in Paris she could be and live!

I loved this slim book;, it is a perfect slice of her life. The book’s kernel is the story of this obsession with wanting to know who this woman is. But the way it is written grips you as a reader; you wonder what she will do next and how far this obsession with this woman will take her! I know it is easy to find out who it is, but for me, the beauty of this is the lack of who they are; the more they are a pen picture of an ex-lover or his new lover, the other woman. What happens when she end the relationship sand soon after this woman now has access to his cock not her like she once did this forty year old woman with her long hair becomes a faceless ghost in the book for us as the reader but also for Ernaux as she flesh out a woman she never really want to met maybe the writing of this book was her way of cleansing her soul of it all! I think this is one of my favourites. Books from her it is just perfect, a little insight, a small gem of a book. Do you have a favourite book by her?