August 19, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

All That Remains by Virginie Grimaldi tr. Hildegarde Serle (2025)

Contemporary French literature translated to English Virginie Grimaldi All That Remains Il nous restera ça three silhouettes mimosa flowers

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’s All 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 »!

Grief, Homelessness and New Beginnings

sprigs of mimosa new beginnings, resilience, surviving in difficult conditions Virgine Grimaldi All That Remains — Photo by Eva Bronzini on Pexels.com

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.”

Paul, a French boulangerie bakery in London and Aix en Provence patisserie

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.

February 1, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

La Vasque Olympique, the Olympic Cauldron will return

couver un astre

A large helium balloon floats up into the sky in Paris during the Olympic Games

Recently I wrote about Sophie Fontanel’s Couver 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.

Relive the Magic

la vasque olympique — Photo by Mathias Reding on Pexels.com

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?

January 28, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Couver Un Astre by Sophie Fontanel

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.

Sharing the Experience, An Invitation

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

July 24, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Years by Annie Ernaux tr. Alison L. Strayer

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.

Shame Simple Passion The Years Annie Ernaux Nobel Prize Winner 2022

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.

L'occupation Une femme Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit

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.

Author, Annie Ernaux

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.

July 10, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Daughters Beyond Command by Véronique Olmi tr. Alison Andersen

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.

Family saga set in France against social political context of May 68 to the May 81 election

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.

Author, Véronique Olmi

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.

January 9, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Shame (1997) by Annie Ernaux, tr. Tanya Leslie

In her 2022 nobel prize lecture, I Will Write to Avenge My People, Annie Ernaux shares her motivation for writing in the particular way that is unique to her, telling us how it is at odds with the way she taught.

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.

So it with this understanding, that I picked up Simple Passion (my review here) and now Shame, works of non-fiction that explore how certain pivotal events in her life affected her, by noticing her actions and reactions, how her own behaviour or perception changed.

The Origin of Shame

The book opens with a quote from Paul Auster‘s The Invention of Solitude:

Language is not truth.

It is the way we exist in the world.

The opening line begins with the pivotal event, shortly before her 12th birthday:

My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.

and then describes everything she remembers about that day in a page of detail.

It was 15 June 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my workbooks seemed just to drift by.

These words were written 45 years later, around 1997, when this book was first published in French, words that she tells the reader were impossible to write about, even in a personal diary, before then.

Silence Esteemed, The Seed of Unworthiness

I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment. Not being able to write anything else afterwards for instance. (I felt a kind of relief just now when I saw that I could go on writing, that nothing terrible had happened). In fact, now that I have finally committed it to paper, I feel that it is an ordinary incident, far more common among families than I had originally thought. It may be that narrative, any kind of narrative, lends normality to people’s deeds, including the most dramatic ones.

Ernaux looks back at the origin of her experience of shame, awakened to it by certain moments, exploring the change(s) as she is made to feel them, in the many areas of her life within which it dwelt, sometimes just hidden behind a door, always at risk of being discovered by others.

From then on, that Sunday was like a veil that came between me and everything I did. I would play, I would read, I would behave normally but somehow I wasn’t there.

Beginning with that traumatic event, she observes the lingering effect it had on her, the strong presence it maintained, despite the fact that no one ever talked (to her) about it.

She revisits photos and news archives from that day, that time, trying to find something.

Writing an Ethnological Study of Self

While she rejects the idea of traditional therapy, it could be said that she has created her own form of it, by bringing her deepest shame to the page, as if in doing so, she is somehow sending it away, banishing it to readers.

I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago – a domineering mother, a father whose submissiveness is shattered with a murderous gesture. To state it’s ‘childhood trauma’ or ‘that day the idols of childhood were knocked off their pedestal’ does nothing to explain a scene which could only be conveyed by the expression that came to me at the time: ‘gagner malheur‘, to breathe disaster. Here abstract speech fails to reach me.

This text she describes as carrying out an ethnological study of herself.

Like Simple Passion, written in short fragments, it is an engaging read that centres around the year 1952, living by the rules and codes of her world, which usually required unquestioning obedience, without any knowledge that there may be others.

The more I retrace this world of the past, the more terrified I am by its coherence and its strength. Yet I am sure I was perfectly happy there and could aspire to nothing better. For its laws were lost in the sweet, pervasive smells of food and wax polish floating upstairs, the distant shouts coming from the playground and the morning silence shattered by the tinkling of a piano – a girl practicing scales with her music teacher.

A brilliant depiction of a shattering of illusion and the origins of one girls perception of unworthiness.

As the book closes, and the year 1952 ends, her attention is caught by a film/book release.

In his novel, Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shōhei Ōoka writes: ‘All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category’.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Annie Ernaux

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.

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 a brief 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.

November 9, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Time For Outrage, Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel tr. Marion Duvert

Looking Beyond the Ordinary & Expected

On a recent visit to Paris, I accompanied friends on a day-trip to the town of Épernay in the North East of Paris, 30 kilometres south west of Reims. Like Reims, it is known for its champagne houses, vineyards and the close to 50 kilometres of underground tunnels built to store their wine, a veritable underground city.

The town sits on layers of chalk, which gives those underground tunnels their unique aspect that contributes to the uniqueness of their product and why the fierce protection over the use of the word ‘champagne‘. Champagne is only ‘champagne‘ if grown and cellared and produced in the Champagne region of France. If not, its crémant, prosecco, cava, sparkling …

The archbishops of Reims controlled the town of Épernay from the 5th-10th century, it then passed to the counts of Champagne and in 1642 to the Duke of Bouillon.

It was badly damaged during the Hundred Years’ War, and was burned by Francis I in 1544. Having been destroyed or burned more than 20 times, the town has few ancient buildings, the mansions you can see there today are mostly from the 1800’s.

The Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars are on the World Heritage list for the Protection of World Culture and Heritage for all humanity.

The town also houses some 9th century manuscripts, a wine museum and archaeological artifacts.

Stéphane Hessel encourages youth to engage!

As we wandered along the famous Avenue Champagne with its palatial 19th century mansions, some of which can be visited for wine tastings, I looked for number 31 (a favourite number) to take a photo. At about the halfway point in the long, fairly sterile avenue, it was not a champagne house, but a 2,000 + student lycée (high school), named Lycée Stéphane Hessel.

I was intrigued and delighted to see the name of this institution, certain that it must have been named recently, I knew that Stéphane Hessel had died only 10 years ago.

The high school was named in 2013/2014 when the lycée Godart-Roger et lycée Léon-Bourgeois merged to become the lycée Stéphane Hessel, renamed in tribute to this inspirational author of a best-selling essay, written and directed specifically towards youth.

Discovering this lycée was one of the highlights of my visit, I found it brilliantly provocative that in the middle of this world famous avenue of procuring bubbles, sat a human rights activist, member of the Resistance, a voice for peace and equality, the author of a famous essay, written in his 93rd year, 3 years before his death in 2013.

It a short half hour read that has since been translated into numerous languages and sold 4.5 million copies worldwide.

I knew about it because at the Salon de Livre in Paris in 2014, there were massive queues of young people lining up to get their booklet signed by him or to listen to him talk. Journalists were intrigued and wanted to know why these young students were so interested in the words of a very old man. The response was “because he lived it” they said, unlike most who teach us about this era, this man actually lived through everything he has written about. He is authentic, we respect that.

The Essay

Stéphane Hessel wrote his essay in his 93rd year and considered himself fortunate to be able to reflect at that age on events that laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to politics and human rights.

Born in Germany, he became French in 1939 and in 1941 fled to London and became part of Charles de Gaulle’s group of Resistance members.

He returned to France to organise communications, was captured and sent to Buchenwald, tortured and later sentenced to execution by hanging. He and two others managed to escape execution through an act of identity exchange.

He wrote of the declaration adopted by the National Council of Resistance in March 1944, a set of values and principles created to guide the nation’s modern democracy once it was freed from occupation. He reiterated the importance of many freedoms that came with the end of the war, demanding that they continue to be protected for the good of all.

It is the duty of us all to ensure that our society remain one of which we are proud, not a society wary of immigrants and intent on their expulsion or a society that disputes the welfare state or a society in which the media are controlled by the wealthy.

Find Your Reason

The basic motive of the Resistance was indignation. He addressed his young audience, reminding them of this and implores them to find their reason for indignation, to join the great course of history, to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if encountering someone who is robbed of these rights, to have empathy and them help them reclaim them.

He wrote about the rise of fascism and his understanding of the origins of it, and how young people today will find their own reasons for expressing their outrage. His indignation was born less of emotion than a desire to engage. He was influenced by the words of Jean-Paul Sartre who said “You must engage – your humanity depends on it.”

The Worst Attitude is Indifference

There are unbearable things all around us, look for them he said:

This is what I tell young people: If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. “There’s nothing I can do; I get by” – adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage.

He highlights the challenges, of grievous injustices inflicted on people deprived of the essential requirements for a decent life, the widening gap between rich and poor and the violation of basic freedoms and fundamental rights, citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” and his own participation in the creation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I will never forget the crucial role played by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose great kindness and natural authority worked wonders to help reconcile the disparate personalities that comprised the commission. She was a vibrant feminist, and it is largely due to her that, for the first time, and on a global scale, the equality of men and women was inscribed without ambiguity in an official text.

His message is one of active engagement, nonviolence and hope, against injustice.

“TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

It is an inspiring short work, that I encourage everyone to read, its message could not be more appropriate at this time, given all that the world is currently facing.

Stéphane Hessel, Author

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel (20 Oct 1917–26 Feb 2013) was a French diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance member. Born in Germany, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and protection for the post-World War II social vision.

His book IndignezVous! (Time for Outrage! )sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the Arab Spring, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements.

January 13, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Three by Valérie Perrin tr. Hildegarde Serle

From Flowers to Friendship

Valérie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers was the final book I read in Dec 2020 and one of my favourite reads of that year. It is a novel that has stayed with me since, due to a strong sense of place in various locations in France, the unique character of Violette Touissant and her unforgettable choice of careers; she moves from being a level-crossing keeper to cemetery keeper.

“If life is but a passage, let us at least scatter flowers on that passage.”

The Ties That Bind

Valérie Perrin’s latest novel Three, (a 575 page chunkster) is something of a coming-of-age tale of three young people in a small provincial French town, intersecting with the mystery of why they no longer speak to each other, 30 years on.

“They were united by the same ideal: leaving when they were grown up. Quitting this hole to go and live in a city full of traffic lights, noise, and frenzy, of escalators and store windows, with bright lights everywhere, even in the middle of the night. With crowds on the pavements, of strangers, of foreigners one can’t gossip about.”

Set in 1986, the years they were at high school together and 2017 – the year a car is retrieved from the bottom of a lake with the remains of human bones in the back seat – the novel glides back and forth over time, scene by scene, recounting a kaleidoscope of episodes among the three that slowly reveal the depth of their relationships to each other and how they were torn apart.

“Étienne was the leader, Nina the heart, and Adrien followed with never a complaint.”

Unconventional Families

Nina was raised by her grandfather and never knew her single mother. She is both curious and resentful about Marion, with good reason. Having such loyal friends as Adrien and Étienne and the assurity of her grandfather’s presence, she feels secure. He is worried about her, she exhibits signs of taking after her mother, traits he is determined to stamp out.

“He panics. Like lightning in his eyes. He’s brought straight back to his daughter, Marion. His punishment. She was the same. Something like misfortune running in their veins. The mother has contaminated the daughter. An affliction.”

Photo by iOnix on Pexels.com

Adrien lives with his mother Josephine. He sees his father occasionally, a man married to another, who will never leave his wife. He becomes the victim of a bullying teacher at school, the same year he becomes part of the Three. The school year that gave him two friends and took away his innocence.

“Sometimes, he would reappear. Like some public-works inspector, or cop. He barely rang the doorbell before coming in. He would glance around the apartment, at the paintwork, the plumbing, Adrien’s school report, leave yet another cheque on the table in the sitting room, and leave. No doubt his conscience clear.”

When the car is dredged from the bottom of the lake, a fourth voice, the only first person narrator in the novel appears. Virginie is a journalist, clearly someone who was at school with the Three. This character is something of an enigma, never mentioned in the adventures of the Three.

“They had no friends but themselves.They were almost stuck to each other, like puppies from the same litter. And yet, they in no way resembled each other. Neither physically, nor in their attitudes.”

Creating Suspense and Intrigue

Photo Quang Nguyen VinhPexels.com

Valérie Perrin is quite the master at withholding and timing revelations, drip feeding events, turning points and characters to increase the intrigue, leading the reader down various paths of speculation, until further scenes reveal a bigger picture.

As major events occur, we witness how the three respond, how their dreams are both pursued and thwarted, how secrets eat away at them and ultimately how the strength and belief in their friendship can help them, if they can overcome their inner obstacles.

Ultimately, while there is an engaging plot and a multitude of minor intrigues layered around the central mystery, it is a novel that dissects friendship, its random formation and sense of belonging, its source of support to each person and potential for envy and destruction by those outside of it.

Over thirty years, they will make their mistakes, drift apart, come together, indulge resentments, forgive each other and come to realise that acceptance and truth can set them free from pain and longing, that personal histories matter and those who were part of them can help each other to heal.

A Feast of Issues, A Famine of Depth

It is an entertaining and enjoyable novel, the way the text goes back and forth, the slow reveal, felt very much like something written for the screen, not surprising given that the author is a photographer and screenwriter.

My criticism would be that there is an attempt to pack too much into the novel; weighty issues, each of which could have been a central theme of the novel. The sheer number of significant issues it raises, in some way dilutes them and compromises the authenticity of some of the secondary characters. The author has ambitious ideas and an interest in social issues, but as a result some are dealt with too lightly, or used to create intrigue, which at times felt inauthentic, a disservice. It’s neither a conventional mystery/thriller or literary fiction, it sits somewhere between the two, something of a hybrid.

Valérie Perrin, Author

Valérie Perrin is a photographer and screenwriter who was born in the Vosges in 1967, grew up in Bourgogne and settled in Paris in 1986, then Normandy in 1995.

Her novel The Forgotten Sunday (2015) won the Booksellers Choice Award. Her English language debut Changer l’eau des fleurs (Fresh Water for Flowers) (2020) was translated into 30 languages, it won the Prix Maison de la Presse 2018 and the Prix des Lecteurs au livre de poche in 2019 and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2022.

Figaro Littéraire named Perrin one of the 10 best-selling authors in France in 2019, and in Italy, Fresh Water for Flowers was the best selling book of 2020.

N.B. Thank you to the publisher Europa Editions, for providing me a review copy of the novel.

August 1, 2019 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Transit by Anna Seghers tr. Margot Bettauer Dembo

I have wanted to read this novel for a while, ever since reading Jacqui’s review a few years ago. With August focused on #womenintranslation and being asking for a suggestion for our upcoming bookclub, it seemed the perfect moment to read it.

It is an incredible novel, written in a surreal time, while the writer was living in exile in Mexico, Anna Seghers (having left Germany in 1933 to settle in France) was forced (with her husband and two children) to flee from Marseille in 1940, the only port in France at that time that still flew the French flag, the rest under German occupation.

With the help of Varian Fry, (see his autobiography Surrender on Demand) an American journalist who came to Marseille for a year and helped 1500 artists, writers, intellectuals escape Europe; they found safe passage to Mexico, where they stayed until able to return to East Berlin, where she lived until her death in 1983.

While in Mexico she wrote this thought-provoking, accomplished, “existential, political, literary thriller” novel narrated by a 27-year-old German man who has escaped two labour camps (in Germany and France) before arriving in Paris where he promises to do a favour for a friend, coming into possession of a suitcase of documents belonging to a German writer named Weidel, who he learns has taken his own life.

There is an element of the absurd in many of the encounters throughout the entire novel, and one of the first is when the young meets the hotel proprietor, inconvenienced by the death of this man in her establishment, which she’d had to officially register and arrange for burial, she complains that he’d caused her more trouble than the German invasion and that they hadn’t ended there and goes into detail.

“Don’t think that my troubles are over. This man has actually managed to create trouble for me from beyond the grave.”

Our unnamed narrator offers to assist, requiring him to travel to Marseille, where he hopes to stay indefinitely. To avoid checkpoints, he leaves the train a few stops early and descends into the city.

Walking down from the hills, I came to the outer precincts of Marseille. At a bend in the road I saw the sea far below me. A bit later I saw the city itself spread out against the water. It seemed as bare and white as an African city. At last I felt calm. It was the same calm that I experience whenever I like something very much. I almost believed I had reached my goal. In this city, I thought, I could find everything I’d been looking for, that I’d always been looking for. I wonder how many times this feeling will deceive me on entering a strange city!

Descending into Marseille today

Alongside many others genuinely trying to flee, we follow him to hotels, cafes, consulates, shipping offices, travel bureaus and stand in line as he apples for visa and stamps that he has little vested interest in, observing the absurd demands made of people trying to find safe passage to what they hope is a free world. He is given a one month residency and then settles in to watch the world go by, ignoring that he must still establish his intention.

By now I felt part of the community. I had a room of my own, a friend, a lover; but the official at the Office for Aliens on the Rue Louvois had a different view of things. He said, “You must leave tomorrow. We only allow foreigners to stay here in Marseille if they can bring us proof that they intend to leave. You have no visa, in fact not even the prospect of getting one. There is no reason for us to extend your residence permit.”

The man he knows is dead, has a ~~wife~~ widow waiting for him in Marseille, her story becomes part of the young man’s quest, in this transitory city that holds a thin promise of a lifeline to the fulfillment of desperate dreams for so many refugees.

The complexity of requirements means many more are rejected than succeed and all risk being sent to one of the camps that the authorities without hesitation dispatch those whose papers are not in order.

Our narrator is independent, without family and not in possession of a story that invokes sympathy in the reader. A drifter without purpose, he likes the city and wants to stay. His circumstance removes something of the terror and tragedy of what people around him are going through, allowing the reader to see the situation outside of the tragic humanitarian crisis it was.

Instead we witness the absurd situation people have been put in, the endless, near impossible bureaucratic demands refugees encounter, when they are forced to flee homes they don’t want to leave, to go to a safe(r) place equally they don’t necessarily wish to go to, but will do so to survive and in an attempt to keep their families together. And the irony or blindness of those around them who continue with their lives as if nothing has changed.

Sometimes you find real Frenchmen sitting in the Brûleurs des Loups. Instead of talking about visas, they talk about sensible things like the shady deals that go on. I even heard them mention a certain boat that was sailing for Oran. While the Mont Vertoux customers prattle on about all the details of booking a passage on a ship, these people were discussing the particulars of the cargo of copper wire.

I highlighted so many passages that I will go back and reread, it’s a fascinating book that could perhaps only have been written from the safety of exile and from the perspective of the everyday man and woman, without going into detail about the reasons for their haste, for even a safe place can become unsafe, and a manuscript sufficient to sign a death warrant. And even though this book was written 77 years ago, there is much about the bureaucracy that continues to ring true for immigrants in Europe today.

Marseill’s thoroughfare, Le Canibiére

The depiction of Marseille, though in a time of terror is evocative too of that city today, only the places mentioned here are now frequented by people from a different set of countries, those who have fled or left in search of something better in the last 30 years, from parts of Africa, Vietnam, Lebanon and those who just need to disappear for a while, finding anonymity and comradeship in the small alleys and cafes of Marseille, a city of temporary refuge, where everyone has a story that begins elsewhere.

Immigrants of the 21st century – Balade de Noailles

A while ago, I visited a quartier of Marseille, just off Le Canibiére, called Noailles, with a group of university professors looking to know the city’s immigrant population and influence better in anticipation of further developing their classes to incorporate the reality of today.

Bénédicte Sire & One of the Legends of Noailles

The personal tour was guided by local comedien/actor, Bénédicte Sire, who introduced us to a new generation of immigrants who have adopted Marseille as their home. We visited them in their shops tasting the food while listening to personal family stories, narrated either by Bénédicte taking on the persona of a relative, or a combination of her oral storytelling and the shop owner participating.

It was one of the most informative and personal visits I have made to Marseille, it was like a live version of the many novels I have read, translated from countries far away, only here they were living in a city 25 minutes away, facilitated by a warm, cheerful, empathetic woman who has developed authentic relationships with her fellow residents, gently guiding them to open up and share their often traumatic, personal stories with outsiders genuinely interested to know.

Highly Recommended if you ever visit the city of Marseille and wish to see it from within.

June 20, 2019 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain tr. Jane Aitken, Emily Boyce

French Literature

Another satisfying light read full of laughs from Antoine Laurain. It’s so rare that a book actually makes me laugh out loud, but this one did, quite a few times.

It’s far-fetched, but knowing he writes an uplifting tale and creates such fun characters makes me want to read everything he writes.

Here, its 2017 and we meet a Parisian man named Hubert who lives in a building that has been in his family for generations, though now he owns only the apartment he lives in. His wife and daughters are away, he had just attended the management committee meeting for residents and on entering his cellar afterwards discovered a dusty 1954 Vintage Beaujolais.

Accidentally locking himself in, he is rescued by Bob from Milwaukee, who’s rented Madame Renaud’s apartment on AirBnB, an activity forbidden by the committee (say you’re the American cousin if anyone asks) so in a gesture of appreciation Hubert invites Bob and two tenants Julien (a cocktail waiter at Harry’s Bar) and Magalie (a restorer of antique ceramics) to join him to open the bottle.

1954 was a special year and the novel has already taken us to the Saint Antoine vineyards in the Beaujolais wine region, just north of Lyon where the grapes may have been infused with a touch of magic from a low flying unidentified object.

Monsieur Pierre Chauveau (Julien’s great grandfather) gave a witness statement on 16 September 1954, describing what he had seen. His unusual testimony was classified by the police as follows:

Report of an unidentified flying object by one Pierre Chauveau, a wine grower residing in Charmally-les-Vignes.

Though mocked locally, the police weren’t as surprised, by the end of 1954 more than 1,000 witness statements and over 500 reports of UFO sightings had been received by the police across the country. No explanation for this phenomenon was ever found and gradually the number of reported sightings fell back to normal levels – between fifty and one hundred a year.

One evening shortly after, he consumed a bottle of the 1954 Beaujolais, gave some to his dog (as was his habit), went out for a walk and they were never seen again.

The morning after the four in Paris drink the vintage wine, they wake up in 1954.

Hubert loosened his tie and walked rapidly back home, trying as best he could to make sense of the morning’s events. Unless it was a dream, Salvador Dalí was staying at the Hotel Meurice, all the buses were vintage, street sellers had reverted to using hand-drawn carts and the large moustachioed man surveying his building work whom he’d greeted as he left this morning was none other than Monsieur Bouvuer himself, the founder of the charcuterie of that name. The charcuterie that had opened in 1954. Hubert stopped. 1954. The same year as the wine.

As they head out into their day, we too are taken back in time and see the city and people’s habits as they were back in the 1950’s. Bob, who had never been to Paris took the longest time to realise he was no longer in 2017.

The four of them have various interesting encounters, Hubert with a long lost relative whose charred diary he finds in the apartment he left empty for 24 years, Julien meets the original Harry MacElhone, founder of the bar he works in and Magalie seeks out her now thirty-one-year old grandmother Odette.

They meet up at Harry’s to discuss their situation and to come up with a plan on how to get themselves back to their present, which will lead them on another adventure to the wine region of Beaujolais.

It’s an entertaining ride, as they journey across old Paris bringing back to life a few memorable characters and places in Paris of a bygone era.

Along the way, we encounter Jean Gabin, Edith Piaf, Salvador Dali, Robert Doisneau, Marcel Aymé, Jacques Prévert, Hubert de Givenchy, Audrey Hepburn, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, the duke of Windsor and the infamous Scotsman of the winebar where the Bloody Mary was said to be invented, Harry MacElhone.

In a blog post Millésime 54 Antoine Laurain briefly mentions that readers will come across these characters in his book and if you click through you’ll see a collection of portraits of some of them.

These encounters reminded me of Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris, except here, Antoine Laurain pays tribute to more renowned French celebrity characters of Paris, and its the 1950’s not the 1920’s, inviting the reader to discover who they were and where they used to hang out.

In an interview, Laurain explained that the idea of writing a story where his characters travelled back to the 1950’s came to him long ago, before he wrote The President’s Hat. He adored the work of Doisneau and Brassaï, but he needed a way to bring them back to era. The wine became the way and that surge in UFO sightings that actually occurred in 1954, his point of departure.

Vintage 1954 is an invitation to the reader’s imagination to join Laurain’s adventure in 50’s Paris, to discover the vineyards of the Beaujolais region, and is as pleasurable, if not more than the wine itself.

A full-bodied, sweet novella, with depth, elegance, it is expressive, connected, ultimately one of finesse.

Further Reading

Interview Q&A with Antoine Laurain by Gallic Books – Wine and time travel with Antoine Laurain

The Book Trail Vintage 1954 – a few of the book locations in Paris mapped out with explanations (also links to locations in his previous books)

The President’s Hat (reviewed here)

The Red Notebook (reviewed here)

Smoking Kills (reviewed here)