Véronique Olmi

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.

A single mother of two boys wants to take them on a little holiday near the sea. That might sound simple enough, but for this mother, it is a major life event and a challenge, as she suffers from some kind of mental affliction that normally requires her to take daily medication.

This trip is out of the ordinary and we experience it from inside the mind of the mother, the stream of consciousness narrative is so effective here, it gets inside our mind as we read. We feel her sense of anxiety acutely and become almost as sensitive as she is to the threatening hostility of the outside world, that place from which she wishes to protect her children.

She wants them to experience the wonder of the seaside, she takes them for hot chocolate and they visit a funfair, all of which present certain challenges. She observes and reflects on aspects of their characters with a poetic clarity that all mothers will relate to.

“I stopped on the sea wall, my two kids holding my hands, I wondered how to do it, how to say hello to the sea. It was making a hellish noise, really angry, and the children cowered. I stayed there, not moving a muscle, watching it…I’d been waiting for it such a long time!”

It is an incredible novella and I appreciated it all the more, ironically, after following recent discussion on Vishy’s review of Nabakov’s Lolita . They discuss that dilemma many readers have when they recognise an exceptional prose style but feel uncomfortable with the subject or the perceptions of the protagonist. It makes it hard to share an opinion and it takes time to understand our reactions. We observe them first and then try to understand them.

What I found most interesting in those subsequent comments actually came from the more experienced readers, those who had read it more than once and they describe what changed in terms of their own perceptions with subsequent readings. In the first read we react more to the story and character, in subsequent readings it seems the reader has greater insight into the intentions of the writer/artist, beyond surface character and plot.

Those comments made me think more about Beside The Sea and wonder if I might appreciate it more coming to it for a second time. I was in admiration of the style but uncomfortable with the journey. I would recommend it to the curious, thinking reader who isn’t quick to judge and it’s not one to read when you’re feeling fragile.

The author does an incredible job in making the reader empathise with the mother, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy going into that state and arriving at its inevitable conclusion.

I also couldn’t help thinking about these kind of stories in the media, the short versions which usually focus on the result and not what leads people to where they end up. I don’t want to spoil the read, so you’ll just have to read it to find out what I mean by that. I think the enjoyment of this book will also be dependent on where one is on the ‘potential for empathy’ scale.

It is an interesting challenge, that an author would choose to travel inside the mind of someone like this and write in the stream-of-consciousness form. I am sure this was one of the works that the publisher and writer Mieke Ziervogel read as background research in writing her own debut novella ‘Magda‘.

Poignant and thought-provoking given the issues that lie beneath its surface, this is the story that is almost never told and rarely understood by the public, who often only see that end result favoured by the media and judge it far too easily.

This is the first book in the Peirene Press Female Voices: Inner Realities series, all of which I am reading in January 2015.

Next Up : Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal (translated from Catalan)