Tag: french lit

Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal

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Eastbound by Maylis De Keranngal

French fiction

Orignal title – Tangente ver L’est

Translator Jessica Moore

Source – Personal copy

This was a buy from Alnwick when I went to Barter Books. It had been on my radar since coming out. It is published in the UK by Les Fugitives, but in the US, one of my all-time favourite publishers brought it out, Archipelago Books. But her other books in the UK have been published by Maclehose Press, and I have reviewed two of them and read her short story collection. Maylis De Keranagal is a writer who is great at moments, people and how they interact. What drew me to this it was around a Russian soldier defecting and a French woman with her own story.

Aliocha locks himself in the first toilet cubicle that’s free, washes the blood from his face with plenty of water, examines the marks, makes himself a compress by tearing a length of toilet paper from the huge roll attached to the wall and soaks it in ice-cold water before pressing it to his red profile, his swollen nose. And then, ignoring the insults shouted by people waiting outside, their kicks against the door, he takes his time checking the mirror to make sure his face is slowly regaining its colour and volume.

But his bruises mark him out now as a victim, he knows it, and once he’s out of the toilet he seeks out the shadows, the darkness, and reaches his train carriage by slinking along the walls.

As he tries to find a way out of his military service in the train.

The story follows the Trans Siberian Express as it heads across Russia. On board is a young man, Aliocha, barely out of his teens, who is a conscript with his fellow conscripts on this train to spend time in the military in some far-flung hinterland in Siberia. He has tried to get out of it every way he can.So he is trying to find a way to escape of the train and hopefully find freedom. AS he initially hides in a toilet, he sees a woman unlike any he has seen before. This French woman has an air different to anyone else that he has seen. So he follows her and as he feels the fact he could be found he goes in her compartment and gets her to change her clothes so he can seem different she initially is hesitant but lets this young man and as the train g=cross the land we see Helene’s tale and that like Aliocha is on the run from her own problems a love affair with a man called Anton, the passionate affair started in Paris but as time goes on it has gone wrong hence she is escaping on the train as well. This is a tale of two lost souls, each with a reason to want to be as far away from their own lives as possible, colliding on this train.

THE DOORS slide open behind him. Someone has come into the compartment.

Aliocha turns: the woman who got on in Krasnoyarsk, the foreigner, it’s her. In one hand she holds a glass encased in silver mesh, and in the other, a lit cigarette. She stands in profile at a side window; she, too, is rummaging around in the night, the night that never closes completely here, but stays ambiguous, charged with an electric luminosity that always makes you think day is about to break. Aliocha observes her surrepti-tiously, swivelling his eyes in their sockets without moving his body: she’s smoking, very calm, her face faintly shining. He’s never seen women like her, awake at this time of night and alone on trains transporting troops, women in men’s shirts and big boots, not in Moscow;

Helene catches his eye she is so different than other on the Train

I had heard Mookse’s podcast about Hotel novels. I think this is maybe the next subject they may do about books set in a place as a train journey is such a great setting for a novel as it is always a cross-section of people, and this is so much the case here. How else would a young 20-year Russian conscript want to run away ever meet an attractive middle-aged French woman herself also wanting to escape an event in her life? The parallel in the stories is something she has touched on in other books,. The moment is a turning point in the book Mend the Living and the tale of two people connected by a single heart. This has a turning point of a disaster, whether it is death or her trying to escape her world. Then there is the pace of the book. It has that feeling of the train, and when you are on a long trip on a train, but the near you get to the end, the faster the world seems to go, and this is the case here. We find out the two of them stories and when they meet and he hides the book moves on from that point like an intercity 125 on course as the two of them are  Eastbound on the Trans Siberian Express, but maybe both wanting to be Westbound will the find Aliocha and will Helene escape the boredom of her life with Anton back to the city she loves Paris. Have you read any of her books?

Winstons score – +A a great novella from one of the leading French writers

A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quingard

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A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quingard

French fiction

Original title – Terrasse à Rome

Translator – Douglas Penick and Charle Ré

Source – Personal copy

We all have a list of writers we want to get to well. Pascal Quingard has been on my list of writers to read for a couple of years now . I’m not sure where I first heard about this book. It was probably Twitter somewhere. But the fragmented nature of this book, when I heard about it, appealed, and the fact it was about an engraver as we had some acid etch engravings at my father’s house. Quingard has won several prizes won the Prix Goncourt, which in many ways is like the French Booker or is it the other way around? The Goncourt has been going longer. He has written many books, and sadly, they seemed to have never quite been taken in English as a writer. I’m not sure if it is their style of writing or if his books are all different? This is my first but not my last I will say that.

A few days later, one morning in August 1639, a most beautiful day, Nanni wakes him up. Meaume doesn’t believe his eyes. She is there, in his garret. The girl he loves has returned. She is leaning over him. She is tapping his shoulder. He is naked. She does not lust after his naked-ness. On the contrary, she throws a shirt on his belly. She whispers in a low voice, an urgent voice: “Listen to me.

Listen to me.”

She turns around as if someone were following her.

Her face is that of a frightened woman. Her eyes sparkle with anguish. Her face is flushed, gentle, drawn, emaciat-ed, serious. She has dark circles under her eyes. Her long hair is tied back simply under her gray cap. She is wearing a gray dress with a white ruff. She is more beautiful than ever. She bends toward him.

She tells him to go or he may die

This is the life story of an engraver called Geoffrey Meaume. He is learning his trade in Bruge when he falls for the daughter of the goldsmith, her slim waist, hands, and heavy breasts. They meet and fall for one another, but she has a fiance. This is early on in the book, and when the fiance catches up with Meaume, he throws acid in the young man’s face, causing him to be disfigured for the rest of his life. This seems to be the end of it till the young woman appears and tells him that her fiance isn’t happy that he was fined for what he did to Meaume. But this has not simmered, and he now wants Meaume dead. So the young engraver goes on the run and ends up first in Mainz Germany. As he moves the engraving, he draws go from Erotic to religious A man scared for life pours his life into his art but also the memories and glances of women as he goes through his life is a sort of torment life in small chapters as this man has very little joy apart from that one time that ends in is face being burnt off by acid.

He runs, he ran. Left Mainz. He stayed three weeks on his own without putting his nose outside the door of an inn on the other bank of the Rhine where he had taken lodgings in a sort of stable with six other men. Three weeks of dry sobs, his body lying in the hay and its heavy smell. Then he left that world, crossed Wurtemberg, the Swiss cantons, the Alps, the Vatican States, Rome, Naples. He went to hide his face for two years, staying in Ravello above the little village, in a cliff on the Gulf of Salerno. Finally it was Rome in 1643, the Aventine Hill, the terrace with the covered porch, the nocturnal engravings, the scandalous collection of 165o, the erotic cards on which he dreamed of love. The engravings were marked with the sign of the shop, the Black Maltese Cross on the Via Giulia.

He eventually ends up in Rome hence the title .

This is a look at a torment soul a man that was young and brilliant at his art attractive to this young woman and all this end with the acid attack it is a survivor story but the torement from having such a scar and how his disfigured face will effect the rest of his life. As a man broken by that one event and how this can lead to a dark life of repressed desire , sex, and wanting in the man. I loved the fragmented nature of the books they are like etchings from his life a sort of literary version of Gin Lane. This is a tale of a man’s downfall in a way like the famous etching by Hogarth. It reminds you how etchings are the photo magazines of their day capturing events beauties like early in the book or scenes of religious imagery. I have found a writer I want to read lots more from Qingard. It is always a joy to discover a writer with a style I like the fragmented nature of this book as we look at the vignettes of this guy’s life like a pile of old Polaroids telling a story over time in the changes we don’t see at first but in photos and here in the vignettes, we see how his life move on. WHat is your favourite book by this writer?

Winston’s score – A , A new voice for this reviewer to read .

 

Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

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Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

 

French fiction

Original title – Ultramarins

Translator – Cory Stockwell

Source – review copy from translator

Now, I was sent a couple of proofs from Heloise, which was kind. I had been sent their first book, and I just never got around to reviewing it. So, I owe them a review or two. They are another publisher that champions female voices as they say on the website. Héloïse Press champions worldwide female talent. Héloïse’s careful selection of books gives voice to emerging and well-established female writers from home and abroad, with a focus on intimate, visceral and powerful narratives. This is the debut novel from French poet and playwright Mariette Navarro. She came up with the idea of the book after she went on a writer’s retreat that was two weeks on a cargo ship from France to the West Indies. Although she had seasickness, the book was inspired by the notes she took while on the ship.

THEY SLIP INTO THE WATER.

The tips of their toes and then their entire bodies: the sharp pain of the cold and the burning salt that seems to become more potent as it touches the skin. Ribcages compressed by the immense ocean, as though the enormous mass, grey in places, didn’t allow itself to be penetrated quite so easily – witness how, from the beginning of the voyage, the water has systematically closed back in upon itself behind the freighter that does everything in its power to cleave it. You can’t tear it like a piece of cloth; you don’t leave any imprint on it, as you would in sand or snow. By plunging into it, you condemn yourself to invisibility

There is something sexual as she watches them in the water

 

Ultramarine is a poetic book that follows a cargo ship on the journey she took from France across the Atlantic. The big difference she wants to make in her story is that the captain of the ship in the book is female. She is the only female on the ship, but she is respected and well-known, as her father was also a well-known captain on the same shipping line. But when she decides that as the sailors would all like a swim in the ocean a sort of  take on the Neptune festival when you cross the from the hemispheres so they are all lower in a lifeboat the twenty of them but did more come back, there is a point while they are swimming where they try to count the sailor and get 21? But after this piece of freedom, the boat has a weird feeling. The boat slows, and things are going strange. Her connection with the crew changed after that event.

She kept going along these lines, feeling her way for-ward, and for a few weeks that was enough to recreate a kind of link – tenuous, shifting – between her and this captain without a ship. Among her clearest visions was the face of death, which her father had clearly witnessed in a way no one living should see, and which explained his silences better than all the medical scans he was made to undergo.

She thought of that passage from the Odyssey that had made such a mark on her when she was small. Ulysses, lost at sea, arrives by chance in the kingdom of the dead, and proceeds to visit them. He meets sailors who have recently died, shipmates whose death he’d been unaware of, and finally, after a dramatic and tearful build-up, his mother. He’s the only person in the world to have ever been offered the chance to speak to his mother one last time. As for her father, perhaps he also found Ulysses’ secret pathway, but didn’t come all the way back, instead remaining there in this world between worlds where it matters little whether you walk in the rain

this is near the end but Mariette said she loved the Odysessy so this passage jumped out at me

This book has a poetic feel. The Beyond the Zero Podcast features an interview with both the writer and translator, which made me want to read the book. It explained that the seed of novella was from the two weeks she spent on the cargo ship. But the main part of the text is from her notes on the two weeks she spent on the boat. But she wondered what would happen if. The captain, instead of a man, was a woman, and if they had this event in the middle of the cruise, what would happen? The later part of the book has an eerie feel. At times, something isn’t quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it. She mentioned she is a fan of sea-based books from Odyssey to Moby Dick, even though the title is a nod to the deepest blue, a nod to the ocean, a title that was also used by Malcolm Lowry for a ship-based book. Also, there was a band called Ultramarine, best known for the United Kingdom album, which would fit well with this book. it is poetic and dreamy at times. The writer is working on a new novel that will be out later this year in France, and hopefully, we get another poetic slice from this writer. This is one of those books that hasn’t a lot but has such beauty in the writing and the translation. They talked about how some of the ship terms were hard to translate and how poetic Mariiette’s writing is? Have you read any of the books from Heloise Press yet?

Winstons score +A stunning poetic book about a captain and her crew after a swim

 

Clara reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier

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Clara reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier

French fiction

Original title – Clara lit Proust

Translator – Polly Mackintosh

Source – Personal copy

I’ve long been a fan of Gallic books, but it has been a break since I reviewed one of them. But yesterday I was in Sheffield we had gone for a morning out, and I happened on this that hadn’t long come out from them it jumped out as the next few weeks I’m after relatively short books to try and get some more reviews done .it was a reminder to me that I still have to get past swans way in Proust myself but like a lot of projects i needed to get a move on with  this is the tale of a hairdresser discovering a copy of swans way and finding a connection in the modern day to Proust. Stephane has spent time abroad working for the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. He spent a decade in the US. This is his eighth novel but the first to be translated into English.

That same evening, Clara will pick the book up and put it in the bookcase in the corridor, on the same shelf as L’Appel de l’ange and La Fille de papier by Guillaume Musso, Ma médecine naturelle by Dr Fabrice Visson, Glacé by Bernard Minier, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovidby Zlaran Ibrahimovie, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (a gift from Anais, Clara’s childhood friend), The 30 Most Beautiful Hiking Routes in Burgundy (a gift from her father), Trois baisers by Katherine Pancol, Bélier: Daily Horoscopes, the 2011,2013, 2015, 2016 and 2018 editions, as well as a dozen Akira Toriyama mangas, which JB loves. The book will stay there for precisely five months, twenty-nine days, two hours and forty-seven minutes.

The other books she has brought back the cindy Coiffeur

Clara describes the clientele at the quiet hair salon she works, those that come in regularly and how they like their hair on of them decide out of the blue to go Blonde.  Then he colleagues within the hair salon like her tan mad boss . The daily to and fro of a small hair salon in France, she has over time found several books, so when she finds a copy of Swannn’s Way left behind in the salon, she thinks nothing of it till she then falls into Proust world as she is drawn in more than any of the other books she has read over the years. There is a list of the books she has taken from the salon, a footballer biography, horoscopes in books, and a couple from the best-selling French writer Guillaume Musso. But this book captures her with that lightbulb moment when you move from the occasional reader to a fan of books and literature that we all have. So much so that she decided to attend a festival and read the piece of Proust that she loved on the street.

It began with the thought that Nolwenn’s mannerisms were similar to those of Françoise from In Search of Lost Time. Then it was Madame Habib who seemed like a character from the book, with her fits of snobbery, her physical and verbal tics, and her mournful, frog-like eyes. Clara eventually realised that the book is so vast and encompasses so many topics that it is virtually impossible not to see the world through its lens while you are reading it. Even the smallest things become Proustian. A cluster of wisteria, the violet colour of its flowers against its green leaves.Dust suspended in a shaft of light in an otherwise dark room. And Annick, her mother, who always turns her head slightly and half opens her mouth when she is photographed, as if there is someone calling her at the exact same moment. That is Proustian, truly Proustian.

She compares those around her with the porust characters later on

I have loved This sort of book from Gallic Books over the years. They do these great fun reads, light and perfect for a summer evening, and can be read in a couple of hours. It also reminds all of us readers why we love books and reading that moment we all have when we connect with a writer. I’m sure being in France and knowing where he talks about Helps with cracking  Proust a writer. I have read Swann’s way several times but not got into him as much as Clara does here. That is what this is about the power of books to inspire people and how, even over a hundred years later, you can still connect with Proust. I like the little description of the shop and how she fell in with Swann and his story. Have you a favourite book about someone getting inspired by reading?

Winston score -A: This is what Gallic does best. This type of French lit is very French fun, inspiring and like a palate cleanser.

And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod

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And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod

French fiction

Original title – s’adapter

Translator – Ben Faccini

Source – review copy

I love it when you are sent a book from a writer you have reviewed before, and the book you have been sent is completely different from the one you had reviewed. This is the case with this book from the French writer Clara Dupont-Monod. Her previous book I had also reviewed from Maclehose Press, was a historic novel that was about the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Here this is a book set in the present. But actually, some details are sparse. It is about three siblings dealing with a disabled brother. This has a little connection to the writer’s own life. She grew up with a disabled brother. She had already been up for some of the top prizes in France, but this won two, the Prix Femina and GoncourtDes Lyceensa; it became a bestseller in France.

Three months went by before anyone noticed the boy didn’t babble. He remained silent most of the time, apart from the odd cry. Sometimes a smile appeared, or a frown, or a sigh after he finished a bottle of milk.
Occasionally, he got startled when a door slammed. That was it: a few cries and smiles, a frown, the odd sigh or a twitch. Nothing else. He didn’t wriggle. He stayed calm.
He was “inert”, his parents thought without admitting it out loud. The baby showed no interest in faces, in dangling mobiles or rattles. Above all, his shadowy eyes didn’t settle on anything. They seemed to rove from side to side, while his pupils reeled and turned, as if following the dance of an invisible insect, latching onto nothing in particular. The boy couldn’t see the bridge, the two houses, or the courtyard separated from the road by an old wall of reddish stones.

The brother and the house they all live in with the stones that are refered to in the title

The book is about a disabled child and his siblings. The book is told from three points of view of the brother and sister who are around when the brother is alive. There is a very detached nature book. The children are just older brothers and sisters. There are just thoughts of connection, like the older brother getting his face next to his brother and just being there with the child, described as having large black eyes that drift in and out of focus. A plump child with translucent skin and blue vein legs. It made me think of one young man I looked after many years ago who was in a wheelchair but had a child-like appearance. The sister she is distant I really felt her part having spent years working with people with Learning disablities I had seen many sisters and relatives like the sister it is hard having a brother with a disability you can resent the time they suck up from your parents and this is caught well here. Then there is the brother that comes after the disabled brother has passed the child to fill the void, but also you are touched when they said they checked to see everything was okay when he was born, but he has his own issues living in the shadow of what had come before. I loved how she took emotion and names and made the time fluid. It made it feel universal and connect with everyone who grows up with a disabled sibling.

SHE RESENTED THE BOY FROM THE MOMENT HE WAS born. Or rather from the moment her mother waved an orange in front of his eyes and realised he couldn’t see.
The sister’s bedroom window looked straight out on to the courtyard. So she’d seen the bright stain of the fruit’s colour, her mother crouched down, and heard the faintness of her tender, sing-song voice before it fell silent. She remembered the raging chorus of the cicadas, the tumbling roar of the river, the guffawing of the trees shaken by the wind. Yet nothing remained of that summer sound. There was only

The sisters story and how she feels about her brother .

Now I can see why this caught the mood in France. They love a piece of autofiction. But is does capture so well the dynamics of growing up with a disabled brother . The way many siblings go from the devoted sibling to the older brother, he has a wonderfully symbiotic relationship. He knows what every noise and twitch means. I remember a mother that used bring her son for repite that was like this that new her non verbal son so well. Then we have the sister that feels as if she is second best. I have seen this and have not seen it. The sibling mentions that she is never there. The relation, you know, feels like this. After thirty years of supporting various patients and families, these are all observations I have seen. Then, the replacement brother is well written. It captures how maybe the curious incident did capture the autistic view of the world well. It seemed a view at the time. This captures the  inner working of a family with a disabled son when he is there, the void that is left when they die and how it can touch and affect each sibling. This is a gem of a novel that should be better known. Have you read a writer who can write such different books as a historical novel and a heartfelt story of a disabled brother?

Winstons score – A gem of a novella

 

What you need from the night by Lauren Petitmangin

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What You Need From The Night by Laurent Petitmangin

French fiction

Original title –Ce qu‘il faut de nuit

Translator – Shaun Whiteside

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in York on our trip just before Christmas. I felt there is always a french novel that I hadn’t know of on the booker longlist. But I also liked the fact it was a father bringing up his sons after the death of the mother. This is a subject not often tackled in Fiction. I hadn’t heard of Laurent Petitmangin or this book it had won several prizes in France when it came out. The writer came from a family of rail workers in the East of France. I would imagine it is in the Metz area, where the book itself is set in the 54th department  of France. near Lens and Metz (I’m sure Eric Cantona had played for one of them back in the day )

FOR WEEKS WE were invited to Jacky’s and to other people’s houses too. Wed never had so many invitations in the three years of illness, or even before. It was nice, but it made me feel sorry for la moman. She hadn’t been able to take advantage of any of that, of those endless drinks and snacks that led so nicely into a good meal.

We got pretty drunk quite quickly so that we didn’t have to talk, or else so that the flood of words came more easily. The most important was to break that awkward moment that would inevitably come. Feeling obliged to talk about la moman in a lower voice so that the kids carried on playing and didn’t listen.

The weeks after his wife died they are hel;ped by all those around them

When a father loses his wife to Cancer he promises her he will do his best with the kids as they grow up. Of the two sons, Gilou is the younger son. After the loss of his mother, he becomes a studious young man after his mother dies. It is almost as though he throws himself into his studies to deal with his grief. This is not really discussed in the book; it is just my observation of the book. Then there is the older son, Fus, who was actually doing just as well as his brother when their mother passed. But unlike his brother, he goes the other way and starts slipping. But on top of this, he is close with his father and brother, both staunch socialists. So when he comes home wearing Lazio’s symbolic scarves of the Ultras. He is drawn by the feeling of brother he gets from these new friends. This sets father and son on a head course. The book’s backbone is the love between them and the football the father uses for them to bond when the mother dies. But it also shows how easily someone can get caught by the seemingly charming right-wingers he falls in with.

‘What’s that, Fus, your scarf?’ Gillou asked him.

‘No, fatso, that’s not a scarf, it’s a bandana.

I took a look at the bandana myself and I was puzzled.

‘Fus, what’s that cross on there?’

‘Dad, I don’t know anything about it, it’s just a bandana that a mate lent me.

‘Fus, if you don’t know then I’m going to tell you, it’s a Celtic cross! A Celtic cross! My God, Fus, are you wearing fascist gear these days?’

When he sees his brother wearing a Ultras symbol in the form of a bandana

I’m pleased I read this I hadn’t seen it talked about much. But it is my sort of book I like books around family buit this has a little bit of football thrown in. Also, growing up and being tempted by those dark charmers we all meet when we are younger, whether into drugs, drinking, or her, in this case, being right-wing, anything to form a sense of comradeship. I think of the film This is England, where we see a young man drawn down the same path by another charmer in the form of Combo or even a French take on the same story where we see the young Quin Quin drawn to be right-wing in part of the series. The unnamed father had done his best, but it shows what happens when political extremes appear, and they all have to deal with the fallout from this and its effect on the whole family. I am pleased I picked it up as I hadn’t seen it mentioned. I just liked the description when I read it: Waterstones York, where they had it up as maybe a staff pick. Anyway, a book that can be read in the evening lingers with you after you finish it! Have you heard of this book ?

Winston score – B solid novella around grief moving on political extremes and family at the heart of it

May the Tigris grieve for you by Emilienne Malfatto

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May the Tigris grieve for you by Emilienne Malfatto

French fiction

Original title – Que sur toi se lamente le Tigre

Translator – Lorna Scott Fox

Source – personal copy

This is one that had been on my radar since it came out in April last year, so when I saw a copy, I grabbed it and was so pleased I did. Emilienne is a photojournalist and writer. This was her debut novel, and it won the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel when it came out. She is known for her work around social, feminist and post-conflict areas. She has also worked in the Middle East a lot. She has also worked with NGOs and Doctors without Borders. This is a story of one girl’s life falling in as she is unwed and pregnant in Rural Iraq. A book that mixes family and the myth of Gilgamesh and the Tigris.

And then my periods stopped coming. The first month I hardly noticed, it sometimes happened. The following months I thought it was because of grief. I thought Mohammed’s death had dried me up. When Father died I didn’t bleed either, not for months. It’s because of sadness, the doctor said when Mother finally took me to see him. He looked at me kindly, intently, while she was talking about the worry of having an abnormal’ daughter. It was already shame enough to be seeing the doctor about that, may the neighbours never find out, how could they find out, but that was one of my mother’s great dreads. The doctor reassured her, called her Ma’am and said the bleeding would return when my grief had subsided. He had seen several such cases since the war began.’Psychosomatic,’ he said, but we didn’t know that word in Arabic.

She had to go and be sure at the doctors but that set the ball rolling of events later

The book is divided into small chapters as we. We meet a girl who has got up and struggled to do so with black drops on the floor. When she goes up, she goes with her mother to the father’s grave. Then, a doctor. At this point, the girl knows she is pregnant, but when they see the Doctor, the girl knows what this means. They are in the rural area of Iraq. As the country is under the grip of Islamic state fever her life is danger. She is in a village near the river Tigris; the text is interspersed with pieces around the river and the great myth tied up with this region. As Gilgamesh is of the land and memories of those that have lived there as the Tigris follows through the land he lived and she lived. Her boyfriend had died in a friendly fire incident, but that was too late. Now the wheels of what is to happen are set in motion. We hear from her brother and others as we see how a young girl’s life is about to end due to her other half dying before they married.

I am the brother and the dealer of death.I am the man of the family, the eldest, the repository of male authority – the only authority that matters, that has ever mattered.I am the brother who shouldered the father’s mantle. I reign over the women.

I am the killer. Soon I will kill, but I don’t know that yet. What would I do if I knew?Would I turn on my heel in the dusty alleyway? Soon I will kill, believing that I had no choice. Her life or our honour.It is not I who will kill, but the street, the neighbourhood, the town. This whole country.

The brother is faced with a tough decision about his sister and what he has to do

This is a little gem of a book it is under 80 pages and can easily be read in an evening. It is told firstly from the girl’s point of view, then we have other people’s voices as we find out what happened to her. It is an insight into the horrors that have occurred under an Islamic state. In her photojournalist job, you can see how the writer has connected with the world she is describing. The prose’s simple style manages to convey a powerful message and show how females were treated under the Islamic state. As you see ow, a family deals with the horror of losing a daughter and a son killing her, and a mother dealing with these both. A bleak look into Femicide and family pride in the islamic state. The book is made up of short chapters, most less than two pages long, and is one of those books that seem much longer than it is.

Winston score: A powerful look into the Islamic State in Iraq from one girl’s point of view when she feels pregnant out of wedlock and the aftermath no matter the reason why.

 

 

Nothing Belongs to You by Nathacha Appanah

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Nothing belongs to you by Nathacha Appanah

Mauritian fiction

Original title – Rien ne t’appartient

Translator Jeffrey Zuckerman

Source – Review copy

It took years between her first book I read and her the last Brother, which I reviewed on this blog. The Last Brother 13 years ago, I’ve read another of the two books that have come out since by her,, but this is her latest and is with a new translator. Jeffrey Zuckerman has taken over for this book, the last but one novel to come out in French. Like her other books, she is very good at mixing childhood with the present. Also, a theme I have seen in the other novels I have read from Mauritius is a class divide, and the main character in this book is someone who has seen both sides of the divide as a kid and then as an adult. We meet Tara in the present but see how her life has twists and turns.

My heart aches again. I should start by clearing the sofa, arranging the cushions, tossing a tartan rug over it, that’ll be the first thing Eli sees, sentimental man that he is, inclined to believe that belongings gain a mysterious, almost human, aura in how they enter our possession, over the years or in connection to some particular moment. He’s attached to things, a dried leaf, a pebble, an old toy, a yellowing book, a faded T-shirt, a broken wooden necklace that belonged to his mother, this sofa. It was on this sofa that his father died three months ago, and I can still smell it there, his scent, trapped in the cushions fibres. It’s not really the scent he had when he was alive but something that remains of him, that tugs at my heart, that brings me back to his absence and everything that’s fallen apart since his death. Notes of vetiver, a touch of lemon, but also a trace of something powdery, slightly rancid.

Her flat is in disarray

The book follows our Narrator, Tara. She is at a low point in her life. Her husband Emmanuel has died, and her world has fallen apart. Her Parisian Is she going mad? Is she losing it? Her kids are worried about her. She is raising a small boy, and this, as she sees him around the house and area, unlocks the past for her. She had a different name. She was called Vijaya and had a privileged childhood with her parents. They were outspoken, and when disaster struck them, she left the young girl in an orphanage and faced a different future than the one she was expecting. The young girl became the woman Tara, and the past is a way for her to change the present. Like most of her books, she deals with death, class, and also memories so well. Also, the dark past of her country shadowed the life of these two characters, who are the same girl/woman. The lost dream of her youth when her parents and now the loss of her husband bring back the past and her struggle after her parent’s death.

When we went into the village, my father didn’t let go of my hand. All eyes followed us, the rich atheists from the huge house, the girl who danced but didn’t go to school, the man who went on the radio and even IV to say that all this coun try’s inhabitants were the same, that every soul should have the freedom to pray to the god he wanted to or not to believe in just one god, that the leaders were idiots, the man who spoke several languages in the same sentence, the husband of the sorceress. Those glares became a swell behind our back.

As the years went by and the swell grew, I had the feeling that it was hissing at us, berating us. At those moments I couldn’t get back to the house soon enough to find my mother, Aya, the school in the alcove, the evenings listening to music and playing cards. I started wishing I wouldn’t grow up, wouldn’t understand, would stay as I was: Vijaya in the grown-ups shadow.

Remembering  her parents and when she wasn’t called Tara but Vijaya a rich girl.

I love her writing it always uses childhood and memories so well. Also, the past is another theme in her books and also her homeland and its highs and lows, the slums, and the high-class world that lives alongside one another.It is one woman’s painful life at the two lowest points in it and how the heart can be broken and rebuilt but at what cost. Loss of parents then the loss of her opartner but the small boy makes he rember how she got past the pain in the past . But also she has held bqack all the sorrow over time and that is shown at the start of the book. Where we see a woman faling apart after the loss of Emmanuel she has stop caring and her flat is in total disarry as her son tries in vain to help her out f the maze of grief it takes a boy and memories to see her change. Like her other novels she seems to pack a lot into a small book this is under two hundred [ages and is one of those books that feels like an epic novel after you have read it.

Winstons score -A One of the best french language writers around.

 

 

 

A girl’s story by Annie Earnaux

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A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

French non-fiction

Original title – Mémoire de fille

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source – Library book

I intend to work through all of Ernaux’s books over time this is the 5th book by her I will have reviewed on the blog. Which is just a fraction of her works with a number to still be translated I can see me reviewing her books for the next few years. She won the Nobel and it was deserved she is a great advocate of auto-fiction memoir, few writers have taken apart their lives like she has over time. I last saw her go back over an affair in her late middle age and now we find her as a young girl in the fifties becoming a woman a summer at a summer camp and those years we all had when we find who we are sexually as people. But also how fragile we can be in those years.

She is disconcerted by the mingling of the sexes, unprepared for simple camaraderie between boys and girls employed to do the same job. The situation is unfamiliar.Basically, she only knows how to talk to boys with the kind of verbal sparring, at once enticing and derisive, that girls use when a group of boys follows them in the streets – defending themselves while leading them on.At the meeting that is held before the children’s arrival, she glances around at the fifteen-odd boys and finds that none correspond to her dream of falling passionately in love.

A different time but they do mingle later on

This is a book that seems she could have only written years later it takes her own life back to one summer as a young girl on the verge of sexual awakening as she spent a summer at summer camping Normandy. But she also tackles her own problems she had at that time with her own Body image, which led to her having Bulima as it is called now this is a looking back at things and how we maybe understand more of events 60 years later than we did at the time. How other events that summer other encounters scared her for life and affected her life more than she knew at the time this a writer looking back after the Me Too movement at events many years ago in a new light. I love how she does this, she also teases us with gems about the books she was reading at the time I will be going back at some point and looking at the books she mentions. I have a couple I think she mentions Sagan and Gide both of whom I have books from. She captures the difference between males and females at a certain age back then and desire and how it sometimes went too far and how the other half viewed her and other women last the time.

The place, too, is real. In my memory, it has gradually metamorphosed into a kind of castle, a cross between Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes and the palace in Last Year at Marienbad. I tried to find it again in the autumn of 1995 while driving home from Saint-Malo, without success. I was forced to park in the high street of Sand ask a tobacconist how to get to the sanatorium, and when she gazed back at me blankly, as if she had never heard of it, I added, ‘The old medico-educational institute, I believe.’ I only discovered today on the Internet that the place was once an abbey, founded in the Middle Ages. Demolished, rebuilt, and transformed over the centuries. Cannot be visited except on national heritage days.

I could picture this place so well from this one small passage .

I think this is a book she had to wait to write it is filled with looks back at that summer and that time. I imagine it seems very different than it did at the time and how much values have changed but also the dynamics between men and women this is a world just after the war and just at the start lof teenagers being free in a way that hadn’t been for years. As I say seems to be part of the ME TOO movement it came out in 2016 just as people started to reveal things that had happened and like Annie as she recounts events from that summer and sees them in a new light how male violence is always there and how it can affect a lifetime from the first sexual encounter but also other events sexually that summer with an older man but this is a French trade on those events in a way an Annie look at those events many years ago, How much she hated herself now as she was then is eye-opening. She doesn’t have to go to confession because she writes them and we can read them !! Have you read this book by Ernaux ?

Winstons score – B solid piece of her childhood years growing up in a different time to now.

 

Vengeance is mine by Marie Ndiaye

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Vengeance is mine by Marie Ndiaye

French Fiction

Original title –La vengeance m’appartient

Translator – Jordan Stump

Source – review copies

No wonder I never get sent books. I fall behind in my review copies all the time I am just a butterfly read floating here and there, but I need to use my social media more for new books and review them quicker anyway, enough about me. But this is one I should get to soon I have read reviews of two other books from the Prix Goncourt winner Marie Ndiaye and have loved them. She is a writer I think is just getting better she has won the Goncourt longlist for the International Booker and also the International Dublin Literary Award. This was her last novel to be published in French. She is very good at using various threads of stories in her books, and this is the same with this book, all based around the case of a woman accused of killing her three children.

“Sharon, you should have gone home, they’ve shut down the tram for the night.”

Me Susane turned off the riotous lights beaming down from the ceiling.

Sharon, you don’t have to switch on every light in the apartment, M° Susane didn’t say either, because that mark of respect, that show of thoughtfulness you think you have to offer your employer when she comes home late and tired by dazzlingly illuminating her entrance, none of that suits my spirit of frugality, economy and temperance in every act of daily life, no, Sharon, really, switch on only the lights you can’t do without for your work, M° Susane would never, absolutely never, tell her.

Sharon her strange and wonderful Housekeeper

As with her other books, Ndiaye is a weaver of subplots and side stories in this book, as the main driving force in the book is Gillers Principaux, a husband trying to find a lawyer for his wife Marlyne, who is accused of killing their three sons. He arrives at the offices of Maitre Susane small town law practice. She feels she knows this man, and that is one of the threads through the book, a long-hidden event in her youth that involves this man. The other is her trying to find out what happened with Marlyne, who on the surface, is seemingly a normal housewife living a perfect life. But is that what made her break. Then we have another story of Susane’s housekeeper Sharon and her husband who are they? Why is some of the paperwork that Susane needs seemingly lost? how will she react when she hears her employer is defending this woman accused of killing her sons. What did the couple say about what they did after the children were found dead/ Will Susane remember those events many years ago?

Because Gilles Principaux seemed not so much devastated by the death of his children as bent on absolving Marlyne in the eyes of the world.

And why not? thought Me Susane.

And what did it mean to be “devastated”, what unambiguous conclusion was there to be drawn from Gilles Principaux’s dry eyes, his strange smiles before the cameras, his obvious pleasure in holding forth on the horror of it all?

According to what unassailable criteria, both moral and psychological, could one conclude, simply because he smiled so abundantly, that his children’s deaths did not affect him as deeply as they should?

Those unsavoury, vengeful sites had put their finger on one true thing, thought Me Susane: Gilles Principaux had an unusual reaction to the event that was supposed to have shattered his existence.

These lines made me think of the Parents Of Maddie and how there reactions where looked at so closely after she disappeared

I loved this I can see why others hate it as it is one of those books that is like many great French films where what is happening is never quite sure. I think of films like Le Boucher, where a murderer is slowly revealed or last year in Marianbad, where events from the past are forgotten. There is so. many levels and twists in this book. If you take the best physiological thrillers from Highsmith or Du Maurier, throw in some French noir, childhood secrets and then a housekeeper and family with their own secrets. I keep seeing this book in cinematic terms and maybe that is me imaging how it would make a great film with the flashbacks at youth side plots and the whole infanticide, which I have barely mentioned I experienced the feeling that this many years ago in another French novella Beside the sea saw a mother kill her children as well. This is a very French book it seems to me. Ndiaye takes us to dark places and looks at how memory works and how the past ripples into the present. Have you read her books? Have you ever read a book and thought that would just be a stunning film?

Winston’s score – A – One of the greatest living French writers does it again

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

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Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

French literature

Original title – Se perdre

Translator Alison L. Strayer

Source – Review copy

I read this last year and never got around to reviewing it, so I am a recent convert to Audiobooks. I have been signed up to audible for a few months so when I saw this was on there, I decided to list, and I was so pleased I did I’m not sure who the narrator is without going back (Tavia Gilbert, it is ) her voice just suit the book and will forever be th3e voice I will have in my head for Annie Ernaux. The book follows an affair she had with an official from the Russian Embassy. This is the diary of the time. She had also written about it in another book at the time, and this is much later, and she decides it is time to let her innermost thoughts at the time be published.

The outside world is almost totally absent from these pages. To this day, I continue to feel it was more important to record daily thoughts and actions, the things which constitute the novel oflife that a love affair is (details from the socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car), rather than the current events of the period, which can always be checked in archives.

The world for that year is just her and him in this book

There affair starts when she is sent on her first trip to Russia this is the age of Gorbachov, she meets on of the Russian Officials on the trip she calls him S, and that is how she refers to him throughout the book. She says he is 36, but he looks like he is 30, slim and tall and makes her feel petite when she is next to him they sleep on one of the last nights of the trip. He then tells her he is going to France to be part of the Russian Embassy in Paris and thus begins a full-flung affair. Early on, he tells her that he is only there for about a year, and the initial period they meet is before his wife has come to Paris to be with him afternoons of passion with S, but as they grow closer, she remembers her previous affairs and relationship and how drawn, she is to S, and then she has so many doubts about him. Why hasn’t he rung as the year goes on, these doubts grow. She meets the wife and sees them together as she is often invited to the embassy for this event. As that day when he is gone grows nearer, her thoughts of him does he love her is this just passion for the things they have done? She has let him do things no one else had ever done. This is the innermost workings of the affair, being that woman waiting for the call waiting for the afternoon of passion here and there.

 Song by Edith Piaf : Mon dieu , laissez le-moi , encore un peu, un jour, deux jours, un mois, le temps de sadorer et de souffrir…(Oh god, leave him with me,just a little longer, one day,two days,a month…give us time to worship each other and to suffer)

The longer I live, the more I abandon myself to love. The illness and death of my mother revealed the strength of my need for the other. When I say, ‘Ilove you to S, lam amused to hear him reply, ‘Thank you!’ which is not so very far from ‘Thank you, think nothing ofit! And he says to me with happiness and pride, You’ll see my wife! As for me, I’m the writer, the foreigner, the whore the free woman too. I’m not the ‘good woman, whom one possesses and displays, the one who gives consolation. I can’t console anyone.

I loved the Edith Piaf translation the longing in those lyrics

I said I had read this, but it wasn’t till I got the voice I was so drawn into her worries and fears I just got them that thing of an affair or relationship at a distance. It connected me to my long-distance relationship with a German girl I had many years ago, the counting of days and the thoughts that can intrude on your mind when you have time apart and when the mind thinks about the past and what the other person is doing she captures that so well in her thoughts and the openness about her sexual acts with S and how he made her feel just jump off the page. I am so pleased I left this and went back when I finally got the voice of the writer it just made her prose jump off the page so much I have ordered another two of her books from the library. Do you find it easier to get the writer’s voice when reading?I often struggle to get the voice and find when I have the voice of a particular writer I fly through their books.

Winston score – A – a year of passion and worry and the feeling it will end so heartfelt in her words.

The Most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

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The Most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Senegalese fiction

Original title –  La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

Translator – Lara Vergnaud

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to have been sent this by Other press all the way from the US, which I am thankful as they have been bringing some great books in translation out the last couple of years, and this is one I had wanted to read I have toyed with the idea of Prix Goincourt project of some sort, but when I looked at the winners and availability in English for a lot of the older winners it fell apart I’m still after a project that has a lot of older books in translation in it. Anyway, I brought Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s first book, brotherhood a couple of years ago as he was on a list of up-and-coming African writers I had read a few years ago and when he won the Prix Goncourt with this his second book, I decided when offer this book I read this as he is the first francophile writer from Sub Saharan Africa to win the prize.

She entered the elevator, a terrible smile on her lips. As we rose to the thirteenth floor, I plunged, toward utter ruin.

Siga D.’s body had known, done, tried everything. What could I offer her? Where could I take her? What could I think up? Who did I think I was? Those philosophers who extol the inexhaustible virtues of erotic inventiveness never had to deal with a Siga D., whose mere presence wiped away my sexual history. How should I go about it? The fourth floor already. She won’t feel anything, she won’t even feel you enter, your body will liquefy against hers, it will trickle down and be absorbed by the sheets, by the mattress. Seventh. You won’t just drown inside of her, you’ll disappear, disintegrate, crumble, she’s going to obliterate you, and the pieces that are left will drift into the clinamen of the ancient materialists, Leucippus, Democritus of Abdera

His meeting Siga D and her power over him

The book is a novel, but at its heart is a true story it is like one of those dramas where some of the names and facts have been changed. The book focuses on a book and a writer in the novel. The book is called The Labyrinth of Inhumanity and the writer is from Senegal called T C Elimane a man in his day called the BLACK Rimbaud heralded as the voice of Africa, won the Fench literary prize Prix Renaudot but in the novel this happens in 1938 before the war. But the real tale this is partly drawn from is the 1968 winner by the Malian writer Yamboi Oulologuem. His book Bound to Violence had a claim of plagiarism against it . But in his case the editor had removed his credit that the passages are from a couple of books he had used, and that book is due out as a penguin classic soon (I will be getting that when it comes out ). So when Diegan, the main narrator of the book gets hold of this fabled book from a Senegalese writer, Siga D, the two sleep together even though she is a lot older than home, but she has a presence, and as the story unfolds as he hunts for more information about the book and the writer. That Siga D is related to the writer. Our narrator is like a book detective trying to find out what happened after T c Elimane was called a plagiarist and disappeared from sight and was never seen again he follows the years after this happened, and this takes him after the war years to South America, where he had met and mixed with the cream of Latim=n American fiction but also the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz at a point I kept thinking I can’t remember him mention in Gombrowicz Diary which I read many years ago and in one of those odd bookish eclipse moments it happened to be reading this as the new translation of Gombrowicz Possesed came out a book I had in its first translation, be interested to read and compare at some point. The book is a tale of being an African writer and how those writers are viewed, but is also a great road trip novel as we follow the trail left by Elimane.

My roommate, who refused to frequent our writers coterie (he found our mentality too bourgeois), finally read The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. His verdict was terse: “hard to translate,” which by his criteria amounted to the highest praise.

He asked me questions about the book and the author. I told him what I knew. The story intrigued him, and he told me I should visit the press archives. If I was able to gain access to certain newspapers from 1938, I might, he thought, be able to find out something. I told him that when I came to Paris eight years earlier, I had already tried to access old newspapers in search of traces of The Labyrinth of Inhu-manity. In particular, I had been hoping to read the investigation by Bollème (Brigitte) mentioned by the Reader’s Guide in its T.C. Elimane entry. All my attempts had ended in failure. Though I had discovered, in regard to Brigitte Bollème, that after a long career as a literary journalist for Revue des deux modes and publishing a few monographs, she had sat on the jury for the Prix Femina, over which she presided from 1973 to her death in 1985.

He starting down the rabbit hole of this writer and his story

Wow!!!, that is the simplest word for this book. I was blown away by it I had to keep pinching myself to remind myself that the actual book doesn’t exist as I so want to join Diegane in his journey alongside ass he finds the editors and those involved in the book he is like a New Yorker fact checker running down. I Love tracking down writers. There are many a rabbit hole I get drawn down and many a half projects on my shelves, unlike here, where he has got down and dug up the labyrinth around the book, he has answered what happened after that in a case like this is not often known the real writer didn’t quite disappear as much as Elimane does in the book . It made me want to read Yambo’s actual book. Sarr has captured the love of books readers had thrown in a road trip to the mix and just some wonderful characters along the way. I am reminded how many great Francophile and English books from Africa are forgotten or never widely known. He shows how hard it can be to break through as an African writer in the way they are discussed in part of the book in Paris. I think my love for this book should be clear I am on a golden run of books now. Have you read this or any great new voices from Senegal or elsewhere in francophile Africa?

Winston score +++++++A Gone a Little John Peel with my score as one of the best books I have read in many a year.

A Sunday in Ville- d’Avary by Dominique Barberis

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A sunday in Ville-d-Avray by Dominique Barberis

French fiction

Original title – Un Dimanche á Vile-d’Avray

Translator – John Cullen

Sources -Personal copy

This book is another holiday buy, but this time it was last year’s trip to Northumberland I brought this book. I think I may have seen Jacqui mention it 9feels like a book she would love to me ). So I got it. I have seen several excellent books in translation in the last couple of years from Daunt books. Dominique Barberis was born in Cameroon as her father was a diplomat. She studied at the Sorbonne, then went on to teach, had a job in insurance and then became a professor of foreign languages. She has published several Literary studies books as well as eight novels. This was her latest novel and focused on the relationship between two sisters.

I believe my sister stayed under the spell of that literary love affair for a long time, while I, younger but clearly more practical-minded, developed a crush on my first-year Latin teacher, Monsieur Jumeau (Bernard Jumeau). My grades climbed up to the heights. I knew my declensions by heart. I worked hard to dazzle him. Things went so far that predictions for my future employment shifted from cashier to Latinist or archivist-palaeographer – which had been Monsieur lumeau’s first vocation and fondest dream; he told us about it in the course of a gathering in the faculty room. Blushing and modest, I stood between my parents the whole time. I was twelve.He suggested the same future for me, a suggestion I took as a declaration of reciprocal love and a discreet way of making our engagement official.

Her sister feel in loove with books when they were younger.

The book is about two sisters who, as kids, were close, but as often happens when we grow, the distance comes between us, and time flies, so we meet Jane. She tells us about her other half, Luc, and how he hates going to the sister who is married to a doctor, and they live in Ville-d -avary one of these posh commuter towns on the very edge of Pasris as she says it seems hard to get there, but it isn’t it is just fact the two sisters now live in different worlds than they once did. So when Jane heads out one Sunday to meet her sister, Claire Marie, she hasn’t; let her know she is turning up as she feels her sister knows how to press her buttons. (doesn’t every sibling know this !!) So when they talk, and an odd comment about Jane is happy in her life leaves her wondering and then she finds out about a connection her sister has made to a mysterious man she has just told her about many years earlier that offered her a lift one day. Marc Herman, he is a man of mystery and the two connect, and she meets him again and again. But also, the area is seeing things happen at the same time odd men hanging around, crime. Added to this her sister as a child was obsessed with Rochester from Jane Eyre as a child for a really long time. Who is Marc? He said he knew her from her husband, but does he?

Then may I drop you off?

They went back to his car, chatting as they walked, and after a detour found themselves pleasantly strolling the streets in the vicinity of the Chaville train station.’Let’s just say goodbye here,’ my sister said, all of a sudden. ‘It’s much simpler. You needn’t trouble yourself. It’s late, and mine is the very next stop. I’ll take the train.’

But Marc Hermann didn’t look like a man in a hurry. He protested: ‘But why? Don’t go yet.’ She stayed. She wondered how she’d be able to get away from him. Would she have to thrust out her hand?

When she meet the mystreious Marc Hreman he is almost a Modiano character

This is a book that captures that commuter life well but also how it can have a dark underbelly and that shimmering tension that there can be between sisters. I was reminded of Simenon or Modiano, both of which do tension. Both also show that often there is darkness and other things just under the surface no matter how perfect the streets are, and this is that sort of town perfection but with a little crack little piece of darkness and this shows a little of them but also the sibling connection it is a modern sibling story were sisters are more distant than they used to be. Desire and jealousy are here just below the surface, also lost loves. Have you read any of the recent books from Daunt books which one shall I try next?

Winston’s score – B – just below the surfaces simmer a lot between the sisters but also where she lives

 

Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

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Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

French lit

Original title Malentendu à Moscou

Translator – Terry Keefe

Source – personal copy

I was looking in my local Waterstones for a book for this month I have a lot at home but was trying to get some other choices and I saw this I had recently brought her lost novel that came out last year and the French writer and  Simone de Beauvoir is some I had only e=read second sex in my late teens so not is time to read some more of her writing and this rediscover novella that came out a decade ago in France did catch my eye especially as I had read a couple of Gorges Simone works that were set in the Soviet Union from around this time . I know there is a strong connection between France and Russia as many Russian went to live in France. de Beauvoir herself spent time in the USSR during the sixties.

‘Your nationalism won’t be easily dislodged,’ he con-tinued, as they came out of the church. ‘The gist of what you have just explained is that you are no longer a revolutionary country and that that’s fine

‘Not at all. We have had the revolution and it is not in question. But in France you don’t know what war is. We do. We don’t want it.”

Macha had spoken angrily and André, too, felt annoyed.

‘No one wants it. What I’m saying is that if you give America a free hand, if you don’t stop the escalation, that’s when America is to be feared. Munich prevented nothing at all.’

One of the many discussions I loved these.

This is the story of three people: a retired couple Nicole and Andre are heading to Moscow f0or their summer holidays  as they are seeing Andres’s first daughter from his first marriage Macha who is living in Moscow. I loved a quip they made they could tell she is in Moscow because of her very tight perm this felt like a very French observation of Macha. The three are looking forward to the time to gather but this is a couple that are set in their ways like a pair of old slippers the spark has gone so this leads them into long discussions of the world lot about the two worlds easy and west. Talked about in what are often described in the book as a dull place of grey rooms and boring hotels. As they talk like they are on the left bank discussing in that loud way one almost pictures DE Beauvoir and Satre not Nicole and Andre as they discuss the Soviet world and how it impacts the West ad to this is the three-way relationship between father and daughter and that with stepmother love but at times there are cracks.

André found the hotel that they stayed at in Leningrad charming. Long corridors and pearl-grey doors opening onto them, with oval panes at the top framed by old-fashioned festoons and hung with silk curtains, which were pink, green or blue according to which floor you were on.

In their room there was an alcove, hidden by a curtain, and endearing old furniture: a heavy desk of false marble, a black leather sofa, a table covered by a tablecloth with fringes. Chandeliers with crystal pendants lit up the dining room, where a young, semi-naked woman in marble was adjusting her dress with a naughty smile – or was she taking it off?

There is a dullness to the hotel very unappealing how it is described here.

This was unfinished in her lifetime and there is a sense of it being a little unpolished, The Moscow she describes is the one we had imagined great building but the modern life for the everyday muscovites as grey almost murky at times. This is story of family, politics and life in general and these are subjects de Beauvoir always wrote about for me the beauty of this coming out is to imagine that it in part of her and Satre as the couple the way they discuss the world and being a fly on the wall almost. it is a couple at that age where the spark has gone and you can see that but a deep love and connection is still there  As a reader, I sit on the fence with post-HUMOUS WORKS. I think if like this they still have merit in the writer’s canon which I feel this does it comes from her own experience in the Soviet Union of the time. It is 110 pages and is what one would call a film book as it can be read in a couple of hours. Have you read any books by Simone de Beauvoir or this one , what are your thoughts on post homes publishing of unfinished for nearly finished works ?

Winstons score – b an insight into a bygone place soviet Moscow !