We are just coming out of our second summer heatwave and in this kind of heat, where it’s 38°C (100°F) every afternoon, reading needs to be light and propulsive, because the brain just doesn’t function in the same way.
I chose to read French author Virginie Grimaldi’sAll That Remains because I felt sure it would provide the sustenance I was looking for, without having to think too much.
Good-hearted, uplifting fiction, great characters and a connection with some of the best parts of French life, that help overcome universal problems that anyone might face. Positive aspects of humanity overcoming the oppressive.
I love the sprigs of mimosa on the book cover, a beautiful winter flowering shrub that thrives in difficult conditions, blooming on the coastal region of the south of France in January and February. It evokes such good feeling, symbolising new beginnings, resilience and adaptability and a sign that spring is on its way.
La Cohabitation Intergénérationnelle
In addition, when I read the premise of three generations living together, it reminded me of a news item I had seen on French television about “La cohabitation intergénérationnelle“, where residents (over 60 years) in Paris and elsewhere, at risk of needing to move out of their apartments or homes, were being matched with students (under 30 years) seeking affordable accommodation, able to be a reassuring presence, particularly at night, and share meals together.
Seeing these people on the screen, sitting talking together, feeling safer at home, having more space, companionship – able to get through those years of difficulty – well, as we say here, « Vive la France »!
It’s a novel about three people from three different generations, who wind up sharing an apartment together, when their needs intersect.
Jeanne (74) is recovering from unexpected widowhood and needs to do something soon to address unforeseen financial concerns, if she wants to remain in her apartment in Paris. The woman in the bakery won’t allow her to put up a notice, but fortunately someone overhears her asking.
For the past three months, Jeanne had been unweaving those habits, thread by thread. The plural had become singular. The setting was the same, the timing the same, and yet everything rang hollow. Even the melancholy had disappeared, as if her entire life had been training for the bereavement she was now facing. She was desensitized.
Iris (33) a care worker, is being evicted from her temporary studio, living out of a suitcase and in hiding from a situation that will be revealed.
“Hello Madame, I just wanted to confirm my interest in your room for rent. And please know that, if it weren’t for my tricky situation, I’d never have interrupted your conversation with the young man, who also seems in real need of a home. If you’ve not yet made your choice, I’d understand if you favour him. Regards Iris.”
Théo (18) is an apprentice in a local boulangerie (bakery) and has just reached the age of independence. Having just bought a car for €200, he parked up outside the house with the blue shutters and thought he’d solved his accommodation woes, however his problems have just magnified.
I don’t intend to drive around in this car. I settle down on the back seat, head resting on my bag, covered with my coat. I put in my earbuds and play Grand Corps Malade’s latest song. I light the roll-up saved since this morning and close my eyes. It’s a long time since I’ve felt this good. No sleeping in the metro for me tonight. For 200 euros, I’ve treated myself to a home.
Jeanne, Iris and Théo in Paris
Each short chapter moves to the next character and within very few pages I was deeply invested in wanting to know more about each one and where the story was going. It’s a wonderful novel about perseverance and overcoming challenges and the messiness of life and finding support and comradeship in unexpected places.
I loved this book and would be not be surprised to see it being made into a film, it’s got all the good vibes and realistic issues that people f all generations have to face, and a unique but encouraging way that different members of a society can be there for those who were strangers at first.
Another #WITMonth read, highly recommended!
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
LEONARD COHEN
Author, Virginie Grimaldi
Virginie Grimaldi was born in 1977 in Bordeaux where she still lives. Translated into more than twenty languages, her novels are carried by endearing characters and a poetic and sensitive pen. Her stories, funny and moving, echo everyone’s life. She is the most read French novelist in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (Le Figaro littéraire/GFK awards) and winner of the Favorite Book of the French in 2022 (France Télévisions).
N.B. Thank you kindly to Europa Editions UK for sending this copy for review.
Recently I wrote about Sophie Fontanel’sCouver un Astre (reviewed here), a poignant reflection on the large balloon that was installed in Le Jardin des Tuileries during the Paris Olympics and Para-Olympics of summer 2024.
Her book describes the effect this installation on herself and the community around her, how its ascent sixty metres into the sky each evening, did something to uplift those who witnessed it, every night.
Back in September 2024, the idea was floated that the city of Paris wished that the installation could be kept in the public gardens after the Olympic Games, an idea that posed a series of technical, financial and heritage problems.
Everybody loves a balloon
The enthusiasm and wonder the balloon generated was quite unexpected by the city and the designer. Very few tickets were available to approach the balloon up close, something Sophie Fontanel ponders in her book.
Yesterday it was announced that this magnificent design by Mathieu Lehanneur will be reinstalled in the Tuileries Gardens, the public space that separates the pyramid of the Louvre, the place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées, for the next three summers until 2028.
So if you didn’t get to see this wonder last summer, from afar or up close, there will be another three summers of opportunity to witness something of what Sophie Fontanel writes about.
An executive order of a different kind
After a joint announcement was made by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo and the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, he posted this message on social media.
“Elle reviendra chaque étè. De la Fête de la musique [21 juin] à la Fête du sport, jusqu’aux Jeux de Los Angeles”
“It will return each summer. From the Music festival to the Sport festival, until the Los Angeles Games.”
In a similar spirit to the Fête de la musique, after the games of 2024, the annual Fête du sport was created. Every year on September 14, sport demonstrations and competitions are held to increase awareness and improve participation in different sports.
It is good to know that those difficulties were somehow overcome, and in a relatively short period of time, in order for the balloon to be ready for the summer of 2025.
The balloon will be accessible to the public from 10am until 7pm every day, and will again rise with the sunset into the Paris sky in the evenings.
Maybe now someone might translate this gem of a book into English, since the wonder of this uplifting balloon is going to be around for a few more summers.
Anyone planning to visit Paris in the next three years?
How to even translate the meaning of this title. Couver means to cover, but that is insufficient to describe what Sophie Fontanel means when she writes ‘Couver un astre’.
While trying to understand the greater meaning, I came across a description that put it like a hen sitting on her eggs, protecting them, brooding, incubating.
A curious way to describe a large balloon don’t you agree? I would have to to read on and find out.
A Ball, A Ballon or An Olympic Cauldron
She was referring to the large twenty-two metre diameter helium-filled balloon that the French designer Mathieu Lehanneur created for the Paris Olympics in July/August 2024. And more specifically, the attachment, adoration and psychological effect this ‘Boule’ had on her and much of the local population, as it sat in the Jardin des Tuileries and every evening rose up skywards and settled there like a full moon, then during the day descended.
It began to gather an almost cult-like following, crowds standing in the street or sitting at their apartment windows, waiting for the moment when the balloon would rise.
With a Huff and a Puff, and an I’m Out of Here
In her slim, contemplative non-fiction work, Sophie Fontanel described her cynicism at the arrival of the Olympic Games into Paris, all the unwanted infrastructure, inconvenience, people and disturbance. So much was she affronted, she left the city the opening ceremony week and went off to a Greek Island with her friends, while another friend, with quite the opposite attitude, quit Bretagne and came to Paris for a month specifically to witness and be a part of the historical moment.
She owns up to exaggerating her anticipated frustrations, but what she isn’t prepared for on her return, is the effect of a giant balloon, seen from the window of her apartment, a balloon that draws crowds as it rises every evening and descends every morning, quietly elevating the ‘joie de vivre’ of those who witness it.
Come Closer, Stand Still, Behold
The book is written during that summer, in sections relating to proximity of observation.
It begins with a series of 8 black and white photos over 4 pages that show the rise and descent of the magnificent creation, followed by:
A Prologue De loin (From afar) De près (Up Close) De plus près (Closer) De tout près (Up Very Close) An Epilogue, by Mathieu Lehanneur
There is her contemplation and wonder of it, occasional conversations, both with friends and strangers, various encounters, concluding with that of the inventor/designer himself, who interacts on her social media post and asks his own contemplative question. A kind of invitation to respond, that manifests into an actual invitation to do what he suggests, to get closer and observe from yet another perspective, the magic of this phenomena.
《Et si vous veniez la voir de près? Histoire d’avoir un autre point de vue…》
What was this hypnotic effect of a lustrous balloon that made us not wish to turn away, that made those walking the rue ravioli lift their gaze. Some filmed it …
“Et puis, ils cessaient de le faire. Ce n’est pas que cela ne rendait pas, c’était que rien ne valait l’admiration simple. De temps en temps, seuls les yeux compte.” 《Eh, c’est à nous, tout ça?》
And then they stopped. Not because it didn’t capture it, it was that nothing beats simple admiration. Sometimes only the eyes can appreciate.
《Hey, this is ours, all this?》
The magic of a gift of a balloon offered to the people. The incomprehension of the gift.
The author posted a few photos and messages on her Instagram account, having observed the balloon from her window. One day a message appears inviting her to come closer. Intrigued she does and so another wonderful aspect of the book, how sharing reflections and observing beauty and wonder can create connection and community.
I bought this as a gift for a couple of my French friends, who had been somewhat ambivalent about the then approaching season of the Olympics, who were pleasantly surprised by their own reaction when it did finally arrive and in many ways brought out the best in people.
It is a testament to the idea that magic can arrive through creativity and community, that the presence of a balloon can lift spirits, as most children know and many adults have forgotten.
I adored this little book and highly recommend it if you took any pleasure in the summer of 2024 Paris and wished to remember the good feeling it brought about in many.
For the moment it is published in French, hopefully it will get picked up and translated into English.
Sophie Fontanel, Author
Sophie Fontanel is an author and essayist living in Paris. She has been an editor at Elle France for more than a decade. She has written 18 books in the French language.
Mathieu Lehanneur, Designer
“This absolutely unique Cauldron represents all the spirit I wanted to give to the Olympic and Paralympic objects. Light, magical and unifying, it will be a beacon in the night and a sun within reach during the day. The fire that burns in it will be made of light and water, like a cool oasis in the heart of summer. I created the Torch, the Relay cauldron and the Olympic Cauldron as three chapters in the same story. The Cauldron is the epilogue and the ultimate symbol of that story. Light, magical and unifying…” ML
In the last two weeks of August, I was on holiday in St-Cyr-sur-Mer and during this time there was a lot of swapping of books. This is one of two works of historical fiction I read.
I started with this one out of interest because it was set in the Champagne region of France, which I had visited in October 2023.
It was interesting to imagine this story set during the lead up to World War II, perhaps not surprising to learn that the area was occupied for four long years and equally understanding that many of the vintners were able to keep their best vintages hidden in the array of underground tunnels behind false walls.
The Winemaker’s Wife is a dual narrative historical fiction novel, set in the champagne town of Rians, France, in 1940 and in 2018 New York City, Paris and Rians.
The plot concerns the unravelling of a family mystery, with secrets, lies, cover-ups, betrayals, and goings on in the network of tunnels beneath the chateau champagne house, Maison Chauveau.
1940 Champagne Region of Rians, France
Inès has just married Michel, the owner of the champagne house, when the Germans invade. She has tried to make herself useful, but doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression. Assisting them are Céline and Theo Laurent, the chef de cave.
Céline was quiet and serious, always tromping around with a frown on her face, while Inès did her best to look on the bright side.
When Inès has had enough, she visits her friend Edith and her husband Edouard at the Brasserie Moulin, but it’s not always safe there and in her naivete, she makes a fatal mistake that is going to affect all of them.
The two couples try to continue to run the winemaking business but the invaders have a taste for more than just champagne. Despite the danger surrounding them, they seem to be inviting trouble, when they make things even more riskier for themselves. And that doesn’t include resistance activities which are even more reason to not bring attention to themselves.
New York to Paris, A Grandmother in her Centennial Year
Meanwhile, in 2019 New York, elusive 99 year old French grandmother Edith turns up unannounced to take her niece Liv on a trip to Paris and Rians and is hiding the reason for going there.
As she gets closer to understanding why they are there, it seems all roads lead to Maison Chauveau and there might even be a love interest for the recently heart broken young woman.
I have to say I questioned the grandmother’s motives given her age. It seemed strange to me that she had waited until her 99th year before taking such a trip, as good as admitting she had intended to take her secrets to the grave. I did not trust her – and with good reason, it turns out.
Imagined History versus Real History
Though it was often difficult for me to believe in the characters and the narrative, having just read the true historical account of Marie Madeleine Fourcade in Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynne Olson, I would recommend The Winemaker’s Wife as a light holiday read for those who enjoy historical fiction, champagne and visiting France.
Extra pics from a stroll down Avenue de Chapagne, where there are many champagne houses like the one above and a visit to the underground champagne storage tunnels of Möet & Chandon in Épernay, October 2023. They’re incredible and worth a visit, an underground labyrinth.
The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler
I became aware of this book thanks to a friend who is also interested in historical stories about women in France. I knew at once I had to read it.
While my friend was still reading it some months ago, I happened to go on a walk, following a route I have taken many times and noticed for the first time that Madame Fourcade’s name featured on one of the street signs. You can imagine my surprise and delight! She became even more of a talking point and I looked forward to getting a copy of the book (not that easy) to read.
I will say if you are interested in reading it, that the font size of the paperback version (which I read) is quite small compared to the hardback version (a copy of which I bought for a friend).
Famous French Women, A Rare Vision
Most of the street signs in France are the names of people that have featured in their recent history. However, it is very rare to come across the name of a woman. In our town Marie Curie has a street sign, but even then, she shares it with her husband. Marie Madeleine Fourcade not only has a sign all to herself, strategically placed at the top of a hill overlooking the town, but she was also the very first woman in France’s history to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, an important complex of buildings in Paris that celebrates France’s military glory.
Marie Madeleine’s father worked for a French shipping company in Shanghai. Her mother refused to stay behind in Paris, though agreed to return to Marseille for the birth of her daughter in 1909. Marie-Madeleine and her siblings grew up in Shanghai, with freedoms unheard of for the social and family circles they hailed from. Those freedoms, an early bilingual education and their return to Paris when she was 10 years old, set her up in many ways for the future role she would play, organising and ultimately leading an important French intelligence network.
As a young woman, she again lived abroad, in Morocco. She drove a car, learned to fly a plane and had a job. She rejected French society’s (and her husband’s) restrictive ideas about how women should behave. She had trained to become a concert pianist, worked at a commercial radio station and would forge her own future.
Access to Important Connections, Two Rivals
Though never in the military herself, she was married briefly to a French military officer, as was her sister. She thus had opportunity to meet and observe some of the younger officers through her social connections, men who would later become important during the war years.
Two of the most prominent members of that younger group – Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Gaulle and Major Georges Loustaunau Lacau – took centre stage in the discussion on rue Vaneau, engaging in a debate that quickly escalated into a full-blown argument. It soon became obvious to Marie-Madeleine that the two officers viewed each other as rivals…
Both products of Saint-Cyr, France’s elite military academy Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, both fought and received multiple citations for bravery in WWI; they were brilliant, ambitious and egocentric. A rebellious streak put them at odds with Marshal Philippe Pétain (a French general who commanded the French Army in WW1 and would become head of what became known as the Régime de VichyVichy France). The rivalry between the pair would also keep them from being unified during the war years and likely impacted perceptions afterwards.
A Partnership, A Turning Point
After a discussion at one of the social events around March 1936, Loustaunau-Lacau contacted Marie-Madeleine and asked for her help in creating a journal that would argue the case for reform of the military and open the eyes of leaders to the imminent threat of Germany. The work would begin immediately.
“One of my Belgian friends has procured secret dossiers that expose the intentions of the German high command,” he said. “I need to get them quickly. Such documents must not travel by mail. You have a car. You must go to Brussels and collect them. I will pay all expenses.”
An Intelligence Network is Formed, Working Inside France
Caught up in this real life spy drama, Marie-Madeleine agreed – a decision that would radically change her life. From that moment, she wrote later, she and Loustaunau-Lacau began building an intelligence network against Nazi Germany.
Over the next two years, they would recruit informants in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany who passed on reports about the build up of the German armed forces. Loustaunau-Lacau adopted the codename Navarre, after Henri de Navarre, later King Henri IV of France. Given the risks they faced, that one of them might be captured or killed, Navarre insisted they share leadership of the network and when he was compromised, as promised Fourcade took the lead role.
At the same time, backbencher in the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill had created a similar private network and Charles de Gaulle decamped to London, setting up his Free French operation. Fourcade suggested they join with him.
Her mentor rejected the idea outright. In England, he said, they would be refugees, just like de Gaulle, dependent on the British for everything. At that point, almost no one in the British government, with the promising exception of Winston Churchill, took de Gaulle and his minuscule band of followers seriously.
They would resist from within.
Another Perspective of History
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is a work of history, told in a compelling narrative voice, that not only focuses on the leadership role of this one extraordinary woman, but will likely expand most reader’s knowledge of what living in France under German occupation was like for the many, who vehemently opposed the way their government had capitulated to a hostile outside force, without much initial resistance.
Personally, the history I learned in school was quite different, as it was told from a very anglo-centric perspective, so the narratives stemmed from how this threat impacted the United Kingdom and their allies.
I never really understood what exactly happened within France in the lead up to the occupation, how it impacted their government and rendered the military ineffective. So many of the protections a country might normally expect when facing a hostile enemy were lacking; to go against the orders of a government (even if under occupation) was a betrayal.
Cinema Can Create Its Own Self Serving Narrative
Though there have been books and films about the war and the French resistance, little has been shown of the importance of the Alliance network and of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s achievements. Most of the attention has gone to stories of sabotage and escape lines, of battles and blitzes.
Saboteurs and other resistance fighters in France were certainly important after D-Day, but they did little to obstruct the Germans before then. Escape networks did heroic work in smuggling shot-down Allied airmen and others out of occupied Europe and back to freedom, but their actual contribution to victory was small.
I would certainly be interested in a cinematic development of Fourcade’s story, one that traverses France and shows a very different side to those who travelling around the country, making radio transmissions and secret flights across the channel, where they are hosted by memorable characters in this real life adventure.
Noah’s Ark and the Hedgehog
Les Invalides Paris
In the late 1960’s Fourcade would get her story down in a gripping memoir entitled Noah’s Ark, the name the German’s referred to their network as, after they would use codenames of animals, Fourcade’s was hérrison (hedgehog), a small animal that intelligently eluded predators.
Lynne Olson provides a thoroughly researched, immensely readable account of the creation of the Alliance, one of the original and most important resistance networks in France. From its foundation by Navarre and Fourcade to the establishment of thousands of recruits, the many dangerous activities they undertook, throughout the war, all that was able to be continued by Fourcade due to her continued leadership deserves to be more widely recognised and appreciated.
They Will Not Be Forgotten, The People
The book is full of stories about the different people she recruited, the relationships and loyalties and daring escapades each of them went on, in order to bring their intelligence to the Alliance.
It is also, sadly, a homage to those who would be punished and killed for their roles, some, so close to the end of the war, it is excruciating to read. That Fourcade survived and was able to share her story and thus the courage and bravery and loyalty of others is a true gift to all humanity.
It’s the first time I have read an account that centres what was happening in France at this local level, with a more global scope, that renders the dangerous and delicate situation of those in the military, who were against the capitulation of their government. While in great danger to themselves, they were able to band together like-minded civilians and provide those on the outside with the information they needed to mount a significant and ultimately successful defence.
Highly Recommended!
Author, Lynne Olson
Lynne Olson is a New York Times bestselling author of nine books of history, most of which focus on World War II. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called her “our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”
Born in Hawaii, Lynne graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arizona. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a journalist, with the Associated Press as a national feature writer in New York, a foreign correspondent in AP’s Moscow bureau, and a political reporter in Washington. She left the AP to join the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, where she covered national politics and eventually the White House.
Lynne’s latest book is Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Woman Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples From Extinction (2023).
Three of her earlier books were immediate New York Times bestsellers; Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against the Nazis (2019), Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II (2013), and Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (2010).
Lynne lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Stanley Cloud, with whom she co-authored two books.
I have had Annie Ernaux’s English translation of The Years on my bookshelf for some time now, since it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. It was originally published in French in 2008 (Les Années) and is considered to be her chef-d’œuvre. It is a non-fiction work that spans the years 1941 to 2006 in France.
Neither memoir or autobiography, it is a unique compilation of memory, experiences, judgments, of political, cultural, personal and collective statements and images that represent a woman living through those years.
It is bookended by descriptions of things seen that are likely never to be seen again.
All the images will disappear:
the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot, after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the café
the tearful face of Alida Valli as she danced with Georges Wilson in the film The Long Absence
There is no call for literary devices or beautification of language or hiding the crude, raw human elements that some may grimace at.
When Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, she gave a speech entitled I Will Write to Avenge My People in which she described deciding on and finding her writing voice, that it would not be like that used by the esteemed writers she taught her students.
What came to me spontaneously was the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame and shame at feeling shame.
Raised by shopkeepers/cafe owners, she considered herself a class-defector through her education alongside the sons and daughters of bourgeoise families. She would find a way through the language she used to address that betrayal, to elude the gaze of the culturally privileged reader.
I adopted a neutral, objective kind of writing, ‘flat’ in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion. The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing, no matter what the subject.
For Ernaux, class mobility is a violent, brutal process and she sees it as her duty to at least attempt, via her authorship, to make amends to those she remembers, has left behind and to not hide from her own perspective, actions, behaviours.
Knowing that The Years was considered her masterpiece, I decided to read some of her earlier short works, to engage with her style and thus appreciate this work all the more and that has certainly been the case. I began with the book she wrote of her father La Place (A Man’s Place), then of childhood Shame, and an affair Simple Passion. I do think it is a good idea to read some of these shorter works before taking on The Years.
In effect The Years is an attempt to collate and offer a faithful account of an entire generation, as it was viewed by one woman and the collective that she was part of. The narrative therefore is written from the perspective of ‘she‘ and ‘we‘, there is no ‘I‘. It is an observation of the times passing and the inclinations of people, for better or worse.
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation.
We read and witness the impact of school, religion, the media, politics on a generation, alongside the cultural influences, the strikes, the films, the advertising, the village gossip and children’s cruelty.
Public or private, school was a place where immutable knowledge was imparted in silence and order, with respect for hierarchy and absolute submission, that is, to wear a smock, line up at the sound of the bell, stand when the headmistress or Mother Superior (but not a teaching assistant) entered the room, to equip oneself with regulation notebooks, pens and pencils, refrain from talking back when observations were made and from wearing trousers in the winter without a skirt over the top. Only teachers were allowed to ask questions. If we did not understand a word or explanation, the fault was ours. We were proud, as of a privilege, to be bound by strict rules and confinement. The uniform required of private institutions was visible proof of their perfection.
While some aspects will be universal, it is by its nature a collective and singular memory of a life in France. That will interest some and not others, but as someone who lives in France today, it is interesting to read of the familiar and also the references to the particular, the cultural, the influences.
Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots.
Because it is clearly written over the many, many years, it comes across as being always in the now, as if she is time travelling into the various versions of the self over the years, looking and noting down the visual memories, remembering and accessing the perspective of the time they were in.
So her book’s form can only emerge from her complete immersion in the images from her memory in order to identify, with relative certainty, the specific signs of the times, the years to which the images belong, gradually linking them to others; to try to hear the words people spoke, what they said about events and things, skim it off the mass of floating speech, that hub bub that tirelessly ferries the wordings and rewordings of what we are and what we must be, think, believe, fear, and hope. All that the world had pressed upon her and her contemporaries she will reuse to reconstitute a common time, the one that made its way through the years of the distant past and glided all the way to the present. By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.
I found it an absolutely compelling read, filling in a lot of gaps and knowledge regarding French history that I happily encounter in this kind of format.
Highly recommended if you are interested in French cultural and personal history from a unique literary perspective.
Have you read any works by Annie Ernaux?
I have a few more shown here that I intend to read in the original French version.
Annie Ernaux was born in Seine-Maritime, France, in September 1940 and currently lives in Paris, France. In October 2022 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy and studied at Rouen University, before becoming a secondary school teacher. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016. In 2017 she was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.
Daughters Beyond Command is a wide ranging chronicle of 1970’s France, seen through the eyes of the Malivieri Catholic family with three daughters, living in an apartment in Aix-en-Provence. It traverses issues of family, feminism, worker’s rights, class, animal rights, amid the rapid transformation of society in the 19070’s France.
While the story follows the changing lives and events, in particular of the daughters and the mother (we don’t learn too much about Bruno, the father), it also demonstrates the shifts in society and of generations that occur through the way these daughters seek their independence. It contrasts with the way their mother harbours secrets and makes other complicit when she does share what she would prefer to hide.
Regardless of their ages or circumstances, the country and the world is changing and attitudes and behaviours are shifting and everyone is forced to reckon with the changes as they impact them in different ways, raising consciousnesses and often unable to maintain previous ways of being .
Sabine, the eldest wants to work in theatre and acting and will do everything she can to pursue that dream in Paris. Fiercely independent, she has developed an irritation around comfort and conformity.
She watched as Maria set the table under Michelle’s authority. She looked at the framed photographs of her cousins who had not yet come home.Happy times on horseback, in cars, on boats. It was like a huge advertising campaign. It filled her with rage. There had to be something behind this publicity for the life she was being shown, both here and at home, in the silver frames of photographs, or poor people’s kitchens, behind the slogans like Moulinex Sets a Woman Free, the injunctions to promote progress, comfort, and the frenzied pursuit of happiness, luxury, and family life, there was something else. Which could be neither bought nor sold.
The second sister Hélène has been seduced by the trappings and comfort of this sophisticated Parisian family. Sabine can’t understand why she chooses to spend so much time with them, a family that lives in a way beyond anything they have ever experienced. Hélène spends most of her holidays with the family who don’t have daughters; the Uncle who has taken a particular interest in her. That regular proximity changes some of her habits, including the way she speaks.
It was a betrayal of the Malivieri clan, and Sabine was astonished that her sister could flaunt her bonds of dependence so naturally.
Hélène will also leave home early and pursue an education Paris, supported by her Uncle. She is less outspoken but equally passionate, affected by moral question around the protection and rights of animals.
As time passed, a breach had come between Hélène and her parents; adaptation upon her return required quickly taking stock of her loved ones. She saw her father, whose kindness and altruism for everything he could not lavish on his family financially. She saw her mother, hard-working and attentive, doggedly managing her household, and the rare moments she seemed to cast off her condition as a housewife, when she really seemed to be her true self, were when they visited Laurence on Saturday afternoons at her bastide.
The student riots of May ’68 had an impact on the nation and caused both fear and admiration in these adults trying to figure out how to parent their daughters, growing up surrounded by influences they could not control.
As the lives of the daughters changes, so too does the outside world. Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi found the movement Choisir la cause des femmes (Choose the Cause of Women) in 1971 to decriminalise abortion in France, riot police storm the Lip watch factory that had been occupied by workers for three months, forcibly removing them; there is talk and images of the horrors of Vietnam, of the desire for freedom, respect for the proletariat, and the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song The Times Are A Changin’, the death of the President Georges Pompidou.
Sabine told her his name was Bob Dylan and that his song said, more or less, that the world was changing, you had to keep your eyes open,and the parents had better watch out, their sons and their daughters were beyond their command. It was a political song.
As time passes and events happen the sisters find a way to strengthen their bond despite their differences, separating from each other and then coming together in solidarity, while their parents seem stuck in time. Agnes, the mother is unable to stop changes happening to her, which will bring about a crisis, one the two older girls question but are again met with silence.
While the novel isn’t necessarily about resolving any of the issues presented, it encapsulates the impact of changing times on the various members of the family in a way that I found interesting, having lived in France for around 19 years, but not during the era mentioned. So much of the landscape was familiar, and some of the references, but many were not.
I appreciated the story for the depiction of what it might have been like to be part of an ordinary family growing up in this town in the 1970’s and learning about the significant events that challenged and affected people’s thinking, seen from the perspective of inside France. It is these changes in the background of the family lives and the adept writing that maintains the narrative pace.
It might be set in the 1970’s but it feels as relevant today in many respects as it did for that era of change.
Further Reading
My review of Véronique Olmi’s novella Beside the Sea (2015)
Véronique Olmi was born in 1962 in Nice and now lives in Paris. She is an acclaimed French dramatist and her twelve plays have won numerous awards. Olmi won the Prix Alain-Fournier emerging artist award for her 2001 novella Bord de Mer (beside the Sea). It has since been translated into all major European languages.
How could I not love a miniature work of narrative nonfiction that the author quotes as having being in part inspired by the opening two lines of a poem from the 18th century English poet Alexander Pope.
The heroic rhyming couplets of Pope’sThe Rape of the Lock (1712) were my optional choice for the fifth form School Certificate exam many moons ago, a memorable chapter of my own literary journey. Kerninon quotes from his Why did I write? what sin to me unknown.
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’, or my own?
Why and How I Write
A Respectable Occupation is a short nonfiction narrative about how and why the French author Julia Kerninon became a writer and the necessity of reading.
I came across this book in a photo on author Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Substack g l i m m e r s where she wrote about her favourite books of the year for 2023.
Dochartaigh is the q u e e n of referencing creative nonfiction and nature writing in her own writing. Her second memoir Cacophony of Bone is full of literary references to little known, enticing contemporary works of narrative nonfiction.
Julia Kerninon had a unique upbringing in many ways, not least because she lived in multiple countries, Canada, England and France, but also because it is as if she were raised to become a writer, more of an expectation than a desire, so she pursues it in the same way many others might pursue a career that has been held in high esteem by their parents. Only writing isn’t like law, medicine or business.
I had an incredibly heavy electric typewriter my mother had lent me, and she had glued little labels with lowercase letters onto the keys because I found capitals confusing, and I wrote lots of stories about talking animals with my friend Pete.
The Legend of Writers
She recalls a kind of bohemian childhood and the first six years where she was an only child and the focus of her mother who she admired, and how her world tilted when they became a family of 4 not 3.
An identical monument of books had saved her as well, thirty years earlier, from a hopeless childhood, and so she spread her secret before me, she explained what she loved most in the world, in a gesture that was also a potlatch, an immeasurably generous offering, which I might be expected to return one day with an even greater gift.
Her mother had been born in a small fishing village, the eldest of four, the only girl, she had learned Russian at ten in boarding school and read everything she could lay her hands on. She passed on all she could to her daughter, who did everything in her power to satisfy her, to repair her, to recompense her for the enormous effort it must have cost her to make all this known to her first child.
I read books non-stop, in a panicked frenzy, trying to catch up on lost time, trying to catch up with my mother who seemed to know everything.
If I lost a manuscript and went crazy with panic, she would just shrug with no compassion at all and explain that in any case I would have to throw away or lose lots of books before writing a single good one. The best thing that can happen to you is a house fire.
At sixteen she had found a community of ‘old poets’ who met in an old biscuit factory in her hometown, a second education, after a house full of books.
At twenty she was reading Gertrude Stein‘s ill-conceived advice: If you don’t work hard when you are twenty, no one will love you when you are thirty.
She confronted her father and told him she wanted to take a gap year from her university studies. He agreed.
I thought that to be a writer, I had to train like an athlete, like a dancer, until it didn’t hurt anymore, until I didn’t ask myself any more questions. I wanted to possess that skill.
She takes herself off to Budapest for a year. Her life becomes a cycle of working hard, playing hard, then taking herself off somewhere for a year or six months to write.
She becomes a waitress in the summers, so she can write throughout the winter. She decides that to be poor is acceptable if she can be free instead and that she would learn to live alone, to be alone, to work alone, during those productive times of her life. That maybe these were not sacrifices at all, they were merely aspects of the life that she had created, that she loved.
Though she figures out how to live like this herself, she attributes this advice given to her by a much loved man:
the main thing is to have free time – you’ll obviously work out how to earn a crust somehow – but free time is something you’ll always have to scavenge, he told me earnestly.
It’s a wonderful little book, a digression of sorts, a reminder that the writing life comes in many shapes and forms, that the sharing of the various experiences can also provide inspiration to those who are on that path and that the pursuit of the occupation can also be a subject to write about, that people like reading about.
I write books because it’s good discipline, because I like sentences and I like putting things in order in a Word document. I like counting the words every night and I like finishing what I start.
I will leave you with one final quote from Julia Kerninon, one that applies as equally to reading as it does to writing.
I’ve been striding through literature like a field, where my footsteps flatten the grass for a moment, just long enough to see the path I’ve taken and the immensity of what is yet to be discovered.
Julia Kerninon is a French novelist from Brittany, whose first novel Buvard (2013) won the prestigious Prix Françoise Sagan in 2014.
Born in 1987, she holds a Ph.D in American Literature. She has been compared to French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer for her sense of style and feeling for dialogue, and to Alain Resnais for the artful structure of her narratives. Most of all, her work stands out for its contagious joy, drive, exuberance.
Kerninon’s second novel, Le dernier amour d’Attila Kiss, won the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas in 2016, and her latest novel, My Devotion, won the 2018 Fénéon Literary Prize. She lives in Nantes.
It is early morning and I hear clack, clack, clack, a wooden sound that makes me think of the quack of a duck. A body memory warns me away, reminding me of duck shooting season at Waimatai, the farm of my adolescence. That sound a lure to less intelligent prey.
There is no lake here.
I take a different path, away from that unnatural, menacing sound, two black labradors at my heels. This forested hillside of the south Luberon is a refuge to the sanglier, the wild pig.
Too late, I discover I have taken the chosen route, they begin to arrive, stirring up dust in their four wheel drive vehicles, les chasseurs, the hunters.
Militant vehicles with dark windows, at least two dogs in kennels on the back, they pass us by, one after the other, bright orange vests and woolen hats visible through the open window. There are so many of them; it takes all my strength to hold back the young labrador Winnie, who senses the excitement of the upcoming chase.
We turn around and head back to safety just as an eighth vehicle passes by with a dozen hounds yapping behind the grill.
La Chasse #2
Safe inside the stone dwelling, the dogs fed, I tell my friend about the hunters we encountered on the track.
“We won’t be walking up to the chapel this visit,” I say when I return. “We are surrounded.”
One hunter in a small white car, an older man, had stopped in front of me and I had asked him if they were hunting the sanglier. I had seen a number of traces in the soft clay beside the track, telltale footprints and the persistent interest of the two dogs, sniffing the area intensely in certain places.
“Yes, we will be up in that area on the left,” he had indicated with his arm.
Left. The route to the hermitage, the lone chapel we had hoped to walk to later on, the area directly behind the house where we were staying for the weekend, looking after Spike and Winnie.
As we plan a different walking route, both labradors begin barking and whining. Winnie the younger dog I have been instructed to keep on a leash at all times, has her GPS tracker charging. I reach for her leash, deciding in that moment that I will keep it on her indoors, just in case. I reach for the kitchen door to secure it at the same moment that my friend is coming in from outside, carrying a jar of tapenade on a wooden board. Winnie pushes past me through the barely open door, brushing my friend aside with a force that sends the olive green tapenade flying, the glass jar smashing on the terrace. Winnie can’t be stopped, though I call and shout her name running across the lawn after her.
I watch her reach the end of the lawn and sail through the air over the top of the electric fence that has been put there to prevent the sangliers from digging up the garden beneath the oak trees. The sound of barking is close by, a frantic, feverish tone. Winnie tears up through the pines beyond the house. I continue calling, I can see the terrain she is mounting is steep and unwieldy.
I try not to think about her encountering those hounds off-leash, or the other black animal that is being hunted, of this naive young labrador moving into the line of fire, of my friends who have entrusted her into our care, of the GPS tracker still charging.
My friend walks to the end of the lawn with the lead in hand. “What are we going to do?” they ask.
“There’s nothing we can do but call her. We can’t go after her.”
“And get shot,” my friend adds.
I take a couple of steps forward to the edge of the lawn, despondent. “Winnie!” I call.
She comes bounding down through the trees towards us.
In October 2022 the French author Annie Ernaux became the first French woman (the seventeenth woman) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a diversity of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner’s responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content—from Lessing’s and Gordimer’s concrete political lessons to Szymborska’s larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)—each contains observations that are at once totally complex and completely true. – extract from LitHub article by Jessi Haley
The Agony and Experience of Class
The Nobel Committee recognised that ‘in her writing, Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class.
They awarded her the prize:
“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”
In this slim volume is the acceptance speech given by Annie Ernaux on 7 December, 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden, alongside a short biography (both translated by Alison L.Strayer). There is a brief banquet speech included, translated by Sophie Lewis.
It is a brilliant introduction to the motivation of the lifetime of work and writing by Annie Ernaux, opening with a reference to the title – alluding to the challenge of a search for the perfect opening line to her upcoming Nobel Prize lecture:
Finding the sentence that will give me the freedom and the firmness to speak without trembling in this place to which you have invited me this evening.
She doesn’t have to look far, she says, although the line she refers to – the title of her talk – is one she wrote in a diary sixty years ago.
j’écrirai pour venger ma race
It was written when she was 22 years old, the daughter of working class parents, studying literature in a faculty of sons and daughters of the local bourgeoise; an echo of ArthurRimbaud’s cry in Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell):
‘I am of an inferior race for all eternity.’
A young woman, the first of her family to be university educated, her youthful idealism was projected into those words.
I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of land-less labourers, factory workers and shop keepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.
Turning Away From Convention
Her first attempt at the novel was rejected by multiple publishers, but it was not this that subdued her desire and pride, to eventually seek a new form of expression.
It was life situations in which the weight of difference between a woman’s existence and that of a man was keenly felt in a society where roles were defined by gender, where contraception was prohibited and termination of pregnancy a crime.
These situations and circumstances instilled in her a pressing need to move away from the “illusory ‘writing about nothing’ of my twenties, to shine light on how her people lived, and to understand the reasons that had caused such distance from her origins.
Like an immigrant now speaking a language not their own, a class-defector, she too had to find her own language, however, it was not to found in the pages of the esteemed writers she had been studying and was teaching:
I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me. What came to me spontaneously was the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame and shame at feeling shame.
Recognising that when a reader was culturally privileged they would maintain the same imposing and condescending outlook on a character in a book, as they would in real life, she sought to elude that kind of gaze and thus her trademark style evolved:
I adopted a neutral, objective kind of writing, ‘flat’ in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion. The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing, no matter what the subject.
It’s an enrapturing lecture and an excellent introduction and insight into Ernaux’s particular and individual style, and wonderful that her volume of work has been recognised and celebrated at this esteemed level. You can read the lecture using the link below.
I have read one book by Ernaux, A Man’s Place and I am planning to read Shame, A Simple Passion and her masterpiece The Years.
Have you read any books by Annie Ernaux? Are you planning to read any?
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery store in the spinning mill district.
They had lost a little girl of seven before I was born. My first memories are inseparable from the war, the bombings that devastated Normandy in 1944.
She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time.
After abrief stint in Finchley, London, cleaning houses all morning and reading from the library all afternoon, she returned to France to study at the University of Rouen. Obtaining a degree in modern literature, she became a school teacher. From 1977 to 2000 she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.
Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France. These books marked a break from the definitive novelistic form, she would continue teaching in order to never depend on commercial success.
One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).
The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.
Fitzcarrraldo Editions have now translated and published eleven of her works into English, including this booklet.
Ernaux’s work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring. – Nobel Prize Committee
Word by Word 