Today I have short reviews of two novellas set in unspecified French locations by Parisian authors, and one set partly in Paris by a Danish author for Paris in July, hosted by Emma at Words and Peace. These three novellas are also books #9-11 of my 20 Books of Summer.
The Garden Square by Marguerite Duras
Translated by Sonia Pitt-Rivers and Irina Morduch
The premise of this 1955 novella is very simple. A young woman, a maid, takes her charge to the garden square to play. Sitting on the bench she strikes up conversation with a stranger, a travelling salesman. They have that ease between them in which it is perfectly possible to tell each other their deepest hopes and desires and corresponding despair. She wants to meet the man of her dreams, he, living out of a suitcase, is effectively homeless and prone to dark
It is written almost entirely in dialogue, apart from a few short paragraphs of scene-setting, and the child occasionally butting in. Duras adapted it for the stage, and you could see it making a good two-hander. However, I found the conversations boring, repetitive and slightly stilted in the translation.
I looked Sonia Pitt-Rivers who did the translation for the 1959 original, and she proved more interesting than the book! She was George Orwell’s second wife, marrying him shortly before he died in 1949. Some years later, she then went on to marry Michael Pitt-Rivers, great-grandson of the Pitt-Rivers whose ethnographic collection, donated to Oxford University is now the Pitt-Rivers Museum. Pitt-Rivers was a closeted homosexual, and had been convicted for buggery before marrying Sonia!
Source: Own copy. Calder paperback, 118 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate link.
Gratitude by Delphine de Vigan
Translated by George Miller
I was searching my shelves for Vigan’s work of autofiction, This is a True Story, but came across this novella from 2019 first. It is the beautifully told story of Michka last days, told by Marie, her sort-of-adopted daughter, and Jérôme, the speech therapist who visits her in the care home to help with her aphasia. It begins with Marie musing on the meaning of ‘gratitude’ and how she will ever be grateful to Michka for taking her in. Now they’ve agreed that Michka should go into a care home.
It happened suddenly. From one day to the next.
I don’t mean it came completely out of the blue.
… then that autumn day that arrived unannounced . . .
Before then, she’d coped. Afterwards, she didn’t.
So Michka moves into a home. Marie comes to see her often, but she and Jérôme don’t cross paths. Jérôme and Michka, however, get on very well.
I go into her room. She looks tired. I can tell immediately she isn’t in a very cooperative mood. But she sits up and furtively pats her hair into place. She tried to give me a smile. I’m always really struck by old ladies’ coquettishness.
On one of Marie’s visits, she asks Michka about how she’s getting on with the speech therapist. Michka hands her a sheet with words and drawings on.
“Do you have to guess the opposites?”
“No, the cinnamons.”
“Synonyms?”
“Exactly. …”
“… You can’t know when the body will pack up, of course, but the head’s already started. The words pack their bags and off they go.”
Over the course of the novella, Michka comes out with some superbly amusing Malapropisms, but it’s clear that the exercises aren’t really helping, as she is more concerned about something else, and she wants to repay an old debt while she still can. She asks Marie to put an ad in the paper searching for a particular family from during the war. What happened back then will be teased out, but will this happen in time? Added drama comes through Michka’s encounters with the ‘nasty director’ of the home, who she thinks wants her out because Michka is a kind of quietly subversive old lady; the reality is, naturally, quite different.
This is a superb novella, sympathetically showing Michka’s decline as told by the two much younger narrators. It also highlights the trauma caused by the war that that generation carries with them. What shines through is Marie and her adopted grandmother’s love for each other, which made this a truly lovely read.
Source: Own copy. Bloomsbury, 2021, 145 pages. BUY in paperback at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
On the Calculation of Volume – I, by Solvej Balle
Translated from the Danish by Barbara J Haveland
This is going to be very short, as there will be another six in the series (four of which are published, the fifth arriving in November). And I’m really glad it hooked me from the very beginning, having already bought the four available.
Balle originally, so I read, had the idea for this series way before the film Groundhog Day (1993), but it took her years to start to write the books. The base premise may be the same – a woman wakes up each day to find it is still November 18th – but the execution of what happens and the mechanisms within are very different.
Tara and her husband Thomas run an online antiquarian bookselling business from their home in northern France. She goes to Paris on November 17th to buy books at auction the next day. She has a successful auction, and afterwards visits her old friend and coin/book dealer Philip’s shop and she has supper with him and his partner. During the evening, she manages to burn her hand on the shop’s heater. She returns to her hotel. The next morning she awakes and something is off…
The novella actually starts on #121. Tara is at home, hiding out in the spare room while Thomas, who thinks she’s in Paris, goes through his daily routine. So obviously right from the beginning, Tara is able to change location, but not key events.
My name is Tara Selter. I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.
She didn’t start out by hiding in the spare room, but gradually couldn’t bear explaining what had happened to Thomas every day and seeing his incomprehension. She tries to understand the mechanism for what is happening: for instance,
It had been plain from the very first day that my body followed me. The burn from Philip’s shop had adhered to my hand, it had stayed with me as a small swollen and painful wound, it wept, it formed a scab which eventually fell off, leaving a red scar which gradually, day by day, had contracted and grown smaller.
Also, the books she bought in Paris begin to stay with her once she’d put them under her pillow at bedtime every night. However, there are problems too – by day #228 the things she buy in the local supermarket remain bought – she’s gradually emptying the never-refilling shelves of her favourite foods. She has to shop further away. The first book ends as day #365 becomes day #366.
I’m not going to analyse things much here – I feel I need to get on and read the next ones in the series to see where we’re going. However, I love the detail and thought that Balle has put into making her protagonist’s predicament as believeable as it is. I appreciated the world-weariness that has settled onto Tara – and we’ve only just finished the first year. Can Balle keep it up?
Source: Own copy. Faber flapped paperback, 2024, 179 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
I do like the beautiful cover of Gratitude.