literature in translation

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.13

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Lost Profile – Françoise Sagan (1974 trans. Joanna Kilmartin 1976) 142 pages

This novella follows a young woman, Josée, as she leaves her abusive husband Alan and is drawn into the orbit of the controlling Julius A.Cram, all within the social sphere of incredibly rich Parisian socialites.  

Sagan has very little time for this echelon of society:

“We talked of this and that, in other words nothing, with the tact that characterises well-bred people once they are at table. It seems that it only takes a knife, a fork, a plate and the appearance of the first course to induce a kind of discretion.”

Josée does very little at the start of the novel and seems to drift around, content to be entirely idle, which makes her vulnerable. She blames herself for her husband’s abuse and then in leaving him finds herself controlled by another man, albeit in a very different way. Julius is an enigmatic character who also seems to operate on the periphery of their social set. Both are lonely in their way, and the people they pass time with are entirely self-involved, so with the exception of her friend Didier, there is no-one to warn Josée of the danger she is in.

“It was an idiosyncrasy common to each individual member of that little set to refer to all the rest as ‘the others’, as though he or she were a paragon of virtue and a superior intelligence who had strayed into a bunch of contemptible socialites.”

As Josée tries to get her life together, the reader has greater awareness than she does herself. We can what is happening in her circumstances that she remains blissfully unaware of, and we can see how these circumstances will play out. She is incisive and clearsighted regarding others, but not remotely self-reflective:

“They were an amiable couple, great friends of Irène Debout, who, having exiled themselves far from Paris out of a grotesque affectation for the simple life, spent their time when they came to the capital, roughly 100 times a year, extolling the charms of solitude. They lived for their weekend house parties.”

Lost Profile is a slight tale, but I always enjoy Sagan’s writing. This was mainly enjoyable for the bitchy portraits of the rich and idle – a quick read, just the right length for the subject matter.

“Perhaps, one day, I too would reach the point of being able to tolerate only a sort of carbon copy of myself, black and white, colourless and spineless. Ah yes, the time would come when I would bicycle without ever leaving my bathroom, chewing pills the while to send my feelings to sleep. Muscled legs and flabby heart, a serene face and a dead soul.”

I’ve mentioned before the terrible 1970s/early 80s Penguin covers for Sagan’s work, and this one is no exception:

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.11

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Broderie Anglaise – Violet Trefusis (1935 trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. 1985) 120 pages

My main reason for picking up Broderie Anglaise was an interest in Violet Trefusis because of her links to Vita Sackville-West, and through her, Virginia Woolf, rather than the novella itself. Although I did enjoy Hunt the Slipper when I read it a few years ago, I was primarily interested to see the characters of Vita and Virginia as conjured in this novella, and the portrait of Knole, Vita’s ancestral home.

Alexa is a celebrated English writer (no prizes for guessing who she represents) who is having an affair with Lord Shorne (Vita). Casting a long shadow over their liaison is his broken heart from a relationship with Anne, a distant cousin (Violet).

“He said to himself that this was exactly the companion he needed – humane and sympathetic and at the same time rather sexless.”

It’s worth noting that Broderie Anglaise was published in French and only translated for the Anglophone market in 1985. Victoria Glendinning says in her preface to this edition that she doesn’t think Vita or Virginia were aware of the novella’s existence. So although the portraits can be quite acidic at times, it’s definitely an easier read knowing that no-one they represented ever read them.

It’s difficult to convey the mind of a genius when you are not a genius. Trefusis wisely glosses over Alexa’s writing and sticks to her anxieties around her affair, and more mundane concerns:

“Alexa went and sat by the window, at the mercy of the light, now no one else was there. A sluggish drizzle was falling. She looked up at the sky. Its full, baroque clouds were like a gathering of Marlborough’s contemporaries – all scrolls and whorls, from their wigs to their shoes. The sky’s not very imaginative, she thought, it always reminds me of something.”

The first part of the novella is Alexa’s anticipation of meeting Anne, when a mutual (oblivious) friend arranges a meeting. She reflects on her affair with John and what little she knows of Anne. The affair is not romanticised; it’s treated with some degree of irony and humour.

“Arm in arm they went up the slippery staircase that led to the state apartments. Alexa supported him. He was the Lord, the ravisher. She was about to become his mistress. They had to go through eight drawing rooms in all – a long way for a couple who had been drinking.”

Violet definitely doesn’t idolise either Vita or herself in the character of Anne. I felt she treated all three as flawed people, struggling to understand the circumstances they found themselves in.

Where she did portray a monstrous person was in the character of Lady Shorne (Lady Sackville). Controlling, intrusive, inappropriate, surrounding herself with trappings – she was truly malevolent.

“The tiny room, cluttered with carefully illuminated pieces of amber, each one lit up from within by its own mocking flame; her hostess, sitting motionless like a big spider in the middle of her web – all combined to make Alexa ill at ease.”

Broderie Anglaise is slight, but it’s definitely worth a read, particularly for those with an interest in Woolf/VSW. The portrait of Lord Shorne’s home Otterways has echoes of Orlando’s estate, being as they are both portraits of Knole. It’s also interesting to see how the Russian Princess of Orlando (Violet) chose to portray herself given a chance. She can be a witty and precise observer:

“‘I use up all my vital force in my books. There’s nothing left over for life,’ she suggested, with the famous touching smile which was so admired in the literary world but which John found exasperating because it was to be seen in all her photographs.”

Ultimately I felt Violet wasn’t overly settling scores here, but rather making a plea for not idolising lovers, even when they are from glamorous families, or are the foremost writer of their generation. She suggests that truly seeing people and situations may be painful, but it is really the only way towards enduring and authentic relationships.

Although she does use a play on words at the end to give herself the final say. And why not, it’s her novella after all 😀

“This was just the sort of thing that irritated him most. She was sentimental when she should have been satirical, obstinate when she should have been amenable.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.7

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A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray – Dominique Barbéris (2019, trans. John Cullen 2021) 152 pages

For the first Sunday of this month of novella reading, a novella set on a Sunday! I was alerted to A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Jacqui’s excellent review and so I was delighted when I came across a copy in my local marvellous charity bookshop.

“On Sundays, you think about life.”

The narrator (referred to as Jane on the French flap blurb although I don’t remember her being named in the text) goes to visit her sister in the Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray for the afternoon. The sisters have intermittent contact and Jane’s urbanite boyfriend Luc seems to have an ambiguous relationship with both his in-laws and the suburbs. For this visit she is alone:

“And so I was full of memories, I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost in Ville d’Avray, by driving through the provincial, peaceful streets of my sister’s neighbourhood, past private houses their gleaming bay windows, their porches, their phony airs (Art Deco villa, Norman country house), their gardens planted with rosebushes and cedars.”

Nothing really happens, and yet the afternoon is full of significance. The sisters sit out in the autumn afternoon and Claire Marie recounts a chaste affair with a man called Marc Hermann. He has both a mysterious past and present:

“She was almost sure that he was lying to her about a great many things, but she felt certain that he was alone and that his solitude was complete, so dense that she could perceive the space it occupied around him, and that solitude touched her heart.”

It is the atmosphere rather than the plot that gives this novella its power. It captures perfectly that quiet, subdued feeling of a Sunday afternoon, anticipating the activity of the week ahead. There is also an unsettling quality to it: the fading light as the sisters sit, the repeated references to the forests that surround the suburb where Claire Marie and Marc would walk; the fear of burglars and invasion.

Jane is at once the first-person narrator and the silent interlocutor. This is a novella of liminal spaces: temporal, geographical and psychological. Barbéris expertly holds the reader between these spaces in the story, destabilising the narrative.  Nothing overt is said or done, but gradually there is a sense of not trusting what we are being told. But should Jane not trust Claire Marie or should the reader not trust the narrator?

I’m sure the atmosphere of this novella will stay with me. A perfect Sunday afternoon read.

“Ever since the neighbour had mowed his lawn, the whole street smelled of cut grass. I don’t know why the smell of cut grass can give you such a feeling of sadness, and also such a violent desire to keep on living.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.3

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Lemon – Kwon Yeo-sun (2019 trans. Janet Hong Higgins  2021) 147 pages

I thought the cover of Lemon was absolutely perfect. The simple image of an absent woman suspended in sky strikingly captures the unsettling quality of this story about a murdered young woman.

Lemon is not a whodunit, although I think that central question is answered obliquely. There is no satisfying resolution with all the ends tide up neatly – that is not what this novella is about. Rather, it is about people struggling to find a way through life when it has been touched by a violent crime. It is about how to try and find peace when there are no easy answers.

The murder of 19-year-old Kim Hae-on in 2002 shocks the local community. The killer is not found, despite two local boys being suspected. Predictable tabloid sensationalism means it becomes known as the High School Beauty Murder, as Kim Hae-on was strikingly beautiful and somewhat unknowable. Yet beyond the cliches lies a life taken and a grieving family.

The various chapters in Lemon have different narrators between 2002 and 2019. It begins with Hae-on’s younger sister Da-on, struggling to understand who she is in the wake of her sister’s killing.

“Does this mean I’m still not free? That I’m not free, not one iota, from those smooth, fair, irrelevant details from 16 years ago, those endless memories of my sister’s loveliness, which had made me undergo plastic surgery, turning my own face into a crude patchwork of her features?”

We gain perspective on Da-on from the memories of a classmate, Sanghui:

“Da-on, the younger sister, was the one who looked after Hae-on, as one would after a little sister. She’d stop her big sister on the street before they reached the school gate and then circle her examining the front and back of her uniform to make sure nothing was out of place.”

[..]

“Then you could witness the older sister fleeing gracefully down the hall or across the school field with her long lithe limbs, while the younger one raced shrieking after her, like some wild animal. They seem never failed to give both teachers and students a good laugh. That was Da-on’s gift. She had a lively, bubbly kind of warmth that could pull Hae-ons devastating, otherworldly, even glacial, beauty into our reality, dissolving it in laughter.”

We learn later on that there was a clear reason for this protectiveness. Hae-on seemed unaware of the modesty expected in society and could forget to wear underwear, sitting in a way that exposed this. Da-on would try to ensure this didn’t happen but the external misreading of this behaviour probably played a part in her sister’s disappearance. There is never any sense of victim-blaming from any of the narrators in Lemon, with one exception and the reader is clearly not expected to align with those views.

More details of the day of the murder emerge through the shifting views, bound up in the lives that continued beyond. There is real sadness here, particularly in the grief of Hae-on’s immediate family and also for Han Manu, one of the suspects.

There is a haunting quality in Lemon. It is never so crass as to make the murder of a young woman anything other than it is; it is not gory entertainment nor is it made easier through a suggestion of any sort of metaphysicality. But by capturing the  fallout of the violence onto the everyday lives of those who knew Hae-on, Kwon Yeo-sun expertly demonstrates the ongoing destructiveness of a life taken.

“It will go on endlessly, until the end of Da-on’s life, or maybe beyond that. Not being able to put an end to an incident so horrific – I couldn’t begin to imagine that kind of weight on her life.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.2

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Winter in Sokcho – Elisa Shua Dusapin (2016 trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins  2020) 154 pages

Day 2 and I’m delighted that yesterday Simon at Stuck in a Book posted that he’ll be joining me with his #ABookaDayinMay, surely adding many more titles to my TBR mountain 🙂

The narrative voice in Winter in Sokcho is an intriguing one: detached yet painfully intimate, ambiguous yet pragmatically clear. A nameless young woman records what happens to her, but it is up to the reader to decipher the meaning.

She works in a hotel in out of season Sokcho, a coastal tourist town sixty kilometres south of the border with North Korea. It is not a glamorous hotel even in peak season:

“Orange and green corridors, lit by blueish light bulbs. Old Park hadn’t moved on from the days after the war, when guests were lured like squids to their nets, dazzled by strings of blinking lights.”

“I loved this coastline, scarred as it was by the line of electrified barbed wire fencing along the shore.”

A guest arrives at the hotel, a French graphic novelist named Kerrand. Slowly he and the woman form a bond that is never quite articulated. It could be sexual. It could be father/daughter (her absent father is French too). He wants her to show him the area as she knows it, but it is a flawed premise from the start:

“He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.”

The isolation both geographical and individual lends the story a bleakness that verges on Gothic, despite all the neon lights. A trip to the border is downright eerie; the other guest in the hotel is permanently swathed in bandages as she recovers from cosmetic surgery.

The pressures on women and their appearance bear heavily on the narrator. Her mother chastises her for eating too little, and she seems to have body dysmorphia/an eating disorder. Her boyfriend leaves for Seoul for a modelling career, casually accepting he’ll undertake facial surgery if that is what is needed for work, and urging her to do the same.

Like so much else in her life, she seems to feel somewhat detached from her boyfriend. There is a sense of everything in her life being a step removed. She has no friends, her mother is suffocating yet pitable and distances with her need to be carefully managed. The narrator speaks with Kerrand in English despite her French being more fluent.  

As her involvement with Kerrand grows, she feels an ambivalence around his drawings of women, which never make it into his published work:

“In bed later, I heard the pen scratching. I pinned myself against the thin wall. An gnawing sound,  irritating. Working its way under my skin. Stopping and starting. I pictured Kerrand, his fingers scurrying like spiders legs, his eyes travelling up, scrutinising the model, looking down at the paper again, looking back up to make sure his pen conveyed the truth of his vision, to keep her from vanishing while he traced the lines.”

This ambivalence moves towards an ending that is wholly ambiguous. It could be read several ways and I remain unsure as to what I think happened. This isn’t remotely unsatisfying but entirely apt. Winter in Sokcho is a compelling exploration of the unknown: in ourselves, in others, and in the forces of history we all live with. How we reconcile ourselves to this is for the individual to discover. I think the narrator did find a way, I’m just not sure what it was…

“You may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way at any moment.”

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.28

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Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac (1927, trans. Gerard Hopkins 1972) 115 pages

Today’s choice sees me return to my much-neglected Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century reading challenge with a classic of French literature.

The novella opens with Thérèse Desqueyroux being acquitted of trying to poison her husband.

“The smell of fog and of baking bread was not merely the ordinary evening smell of an insignificant country town, it was the sweet savour of life given back to her at long last. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the perfume of the sleeping earth, of wet, green grass. She tried not to listen to the little man with the short legs who never once addressed his daughter.”

As she journeys back to her home among pine forests in Landes in south-west France, she reflects on her marriage to Bernard and life so far.

“All around us was the silence: the silence of Argelouse! People who have never lived in that lost corner of the heath-country can have no idea what silence means. It stands like a wall about the house, and the house itself seems as though it was set solid in the dense mass of the forest, whence comes no sign of life, save occasionally the hooting of an owl. (At night I could almost believe that I heard the sob I was at such pains to stifle.)”

There is never any doubt that she tried to poison him. Her family know it and Bernard knows it. However, there is never an obvious reason given for her drastic action. It was an unhappy marriage, a strategic match between Catholic middle-class families, but Thérèse seems to have gone along with it happily enough, mainly due to her fondness for Bernard’s sister Anne (some commentators have suggested Thérèse is gay). She doesn’t love Bernard and she feels no desire for him, but surely history would be littered with bumped-off spouses if that were a reason for murder.

“When all was said, Bernard wasn’t so bad. There was nothing she detested more in novels than the delineation of extraordinary people who had no resemblance to anyone whom one met in normal life.”

When she returns to her husband, she is surprised to learn that the plan is for her to stay, but on what terms?

Thérèse Desqueyroux is a beautifully written, intriguing novel that raises questions without seeking trite answers, including who pays the price for male power; how to create agency when you have almost no choices; the nature of justice.

‘But if I did give you a reason it would seem untrue the moment I got it into words…’

As the cover of the Penguin Classics edition shows, this novella was adapted to film (for the second time) in 2012. This trailer suggests a wonderfully shot, faithful adaptation:

Novella a Day in May 2020 #30

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Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata (1935-7 trans. Edward G Seidensticker 1956) 121 pages

My brother doesn’t often lend me books, in fact I can’t remember the last time he did. So when he lent me Snow Country with the warning ‘I want it back’, I thought it must be exceptionally good. Turns out my brother and the Nobel Prize committee are in agreement on this, as Snow Country was cited when Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

It begins with Shimamura, an overprivileged wastrel who doesn’t have to work, leaving Tokyo to travel to a hot spring town in the north of Japan. He is captivated by Komako, a young geisha who works there.

“The more he tried to call up a clear picture of her, the more his memory failed him, the farther she faded away, leaving him nothing to catch hold. In the midst of this uncertainty only the one hand, and in particular one forefinger, even now seemed damp from her touch, seemed to be pulling him back to her from afar.”

Shimamura has a wife and children back in Tokyo so the relationship with Komako is a commercial one, but still one in which both seem emotionally invested. I say seem, because nothing is ever spelled out in Snow Country. This is not the novella to read if you want fully rounded characterisation or plot development. What Kawabata creates is series of impressions, moments and images that layer on top of each other.

“The woman’s hair, the glass of the window, the sleeve of the kimono – everything he touched was cold in a way Shimamura had never known before.”

That’s not to say that Snow Country is an unsatisfying read. Kawabata is a beautiful, precise writer and he crafts an atmosphere expertly. The natural surroundings are stunningly described, and the people are believable and idiosyncratic, even though we know very little about them.

“there was something sad about the full flesh under that white powder. It suggested woollen cloth, and again it suggested the pelt of some animal.”

It’s also a deeply melancholy read. The two main characters will never be together and both seem trapped. Shimamura by his inability to find a meaningful way to spend his time, Komako by debt and circumstance. The sadness of it all crept up on me due to the writing style I’ve described, and it seemed all the more poignant for doing so, rather than explicitly announcing itself.

My memory is terrible, so as a reader I find what tends to stay with me is not plot or character, but more the atmosphere of a novel and the feelings it evoked. Snow Country is one of those that will stay with me a long time.

“All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever.”

Novella a Day in May 2020 #28

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A Horse Walks into a Bar – David Grossman (2014, trans. Jessica Cohen 2016) 198 pages

A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a novel about a comedian, but the fact that it won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize (there’s an interesting interview with translator Jessica Cohen on the Asymptote blog) is an indication that it has serious things to say. Its takes place in Israel and so it also forms my last stop this novella month on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge, hosted by Hard Book Habit. 

Dovaleh Greenstein is a stand-up comic known as Dovaleh G, and the novel follows his set in a Netanya comedy club over two hours, from the point of view of his childhood friend Avishai Lazar, now a retired district court judge in his late 50s who barely remembers Dovaleh.

“From the minute he got on stage he’s been seeking my eyes. But I can’t look straight at him. I dislike the air in here. I dislike the air he breathes.”

Dovaleh G is not a pleasant man. He berates the audience, he insults their town, he has the style of stand-up that mixes old-fashioned jokes with barely concealed aggression.

“I swear to God, standing before you tonight is the first man in history to get post-partum depression. Five times! Actually four, ‘cause two of them were twins. Actually five, if you count the bout of depression after my birth.”

He’s offensive and at various points audience members walk out. They complain he is not giving them what they paid for – a night of laughs. Instead, Dovaleh recounts his childhood memories: living with his mother who was traumatised from the camps, and his father who beat him. He walked on his hands to escape neighbourhood bullies.

Onstage, he verges on being a bully himself. Someone else is in the audience who remembers him as a child: Azulai, a small woman and spirit medium, to whom he is absolutely brutal. Yet his most vehement aggression is reserved for himself:

“Somehow, on the phone, there was something attractive about his offer, and I can’t deny that he does have his moments on stage, too. When he hit himself, there was something there, I’m not sure what, some sort of alluring abyss that opened up. And the guy is no idiot. He never was”

Grossman captures brilliantly that tension that can exist in stand-up where the audience don’t feel entirely safe, and don’t exactly know where their laughter is coming from. He also exploits fully that a lot of comedy is born out of pain. Dovaleh G is not likable, but throughout the course of the novella he does become understandable, and it is possible to feel compassion for him.

The audience (and readers) become witnesses for Dovaleh G; to his life, his trauma and his anger. What humour there is, is very, very dark. There was a riff on Dr Mengele that actually made me wince – I’m not sure I’ve winced at a book before.

A Horse Walks into a Bar is a devastating read but not a destructive one. At the end I felt there was some hope, which given Grossman is a highly political writer has wider significance than the life of Dovaleh G and Avishai Lazar. I’ve not discussed the politics of the novella because I felt I didn’t know enough about Israel and Palestine to do it justice, but if you know about this in more depth then I’m sure A Horse Walks Into a Bar will have an extra resonance for you.

“How, in such a short time, did he manage to turn the audience, even me to some extent, into household members of his soul?

Novella a Day in May 2020 #25

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The Beautiful Summer – Cesare Pavese (1949, trans. WJ Strachan 1955) 101 pages

Thinking back to when I bought The Beautiful Summer seems so foreign now even though it was at Birmingham New Street station. It’s unusual for me to buy a new book, I usually go to charity shops. But I’d finished my book on the train journey in so I needed something for the journey back. That book was Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, and in WHSmith I could get it with The Beautiful Summer half price (it’s part of Penguin’s European Writers Series). The thought of being in such a huge public space with people milling around, and wandering into a shop to browse and purchase on a whim seems a lifetime ago…

The Beautiful Summer opens with sixteen year old shop assistant Ginia enjoying the feeling that “Life was a perpetual holiday” in 1930s Turin. On the cusp of adulthood, she is also frustrated at knowing there is more life to be had,  most likely away from her friends.

“Rosa was indispensable; with her easy, familiar ways and her high spirits she made Ginia’s superiority plain to the rest of the company.”

Ginia takes up with the older Amelia, an artist’s model, and her free-living friends. Ginia is both intrigued and intimidated:

“the excitement at the discovery that they were both made in the same mould and whoever had seen Amelia naked was really seeing her. She began to feel terribly ill at ease.”

Ginia falls for Guido, an artist who seems to do very little painting, if at all. Her naivete is almost painful to witness:

“He likes me a sweetheart; he loves me. He did not believe I was seventeen, but he kissed my eyes; I am a grown-up woman now”

As the summer progresses, so does their affair, and Ginia grows up. The story of The Beautiful Summer is a tale oft told, of lost innocence, heartache, and learning who you are as you forge your own path. What lifts it above cliché is the compassionate characterisation of Ginia, the non-judgemental portrayals of young people who do not always behave well, and the sense of sad survival rather than devastation.

“Ginia knew he would never marry her, however fond she was of him. She had known this from that evening when she first offered herself to him.”

To end, a Brummie band in honour of my copy’s origins (OK, a blatant excuse for a Duran Duran video as I don’t generally indulge my love of 80s pop during my NADIM posts.) Apparently Simon Le Bon nearly drowned filming this; they should have strapped John Taylor to the windmill instead, I’m sure the buoyancy of his hair would have kept him afloat:

Novella a Day in May 2020 #24

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Astragal – Albertine Sarrazin (1965, trans. Patsy Southgate 1967) 190 pages

I first came across Astragal on Kaggsy’s blog last year, and not long after reading Kaggsy’s post I found a copy in my favourite charity bookshop (how I miss browsing those shelves… it’s been good for my wallet though…) It’s sat in the TBR since then but NADIM prompted me to pick it up.

Generally I’m not one for biographical readings of novels, I prefer to let the work speak for itself and not get too caught up in looking for insights into the author’s life. In Astragal though, it’s pretty unavoidable. Albertine Sarrazin wrote Astragal in prison; she was a French-Algerian who spent her childhood in care and then in reformatory school after being abused by a family member; she escaped to Paris and earned money as a sex worker and through crime. She died at the age of 29 after complications from surgery. It is her picture on the cover.

You’d expect that Astragal was thoroughly depressing, but maybe due to the author’s youth, it stays resolute and optimistic. It begins with Anne leaping to freedom from a prison wall and shattering her talus bone (astragale in French) in the process.

“A match striking. A shooting star, a searchlight. No, it’s the forge in my ankle illuminating the whole crossroad: the sparks whirl around for a moment, then gather and freeze into a brilliant circle of light, a huge torch whose beam passes through my head, and lands, without striking me, on the tree trunk.”

She is rescued by Julien:

“Long before he said anything, I had recognised Julien. There are certain signs imperceptible to people who haven’t done time: a way of talking without moving the lips while the eyes, to throw you off, express indifference or the opposite thing; the cigarette held in the crook of the palm, the waiting for night to act or just to talk, after the uneasy silence of the day.”

These two jailbirds fall in love and go on the lam while Anne’s ankle heals, or fails to. What follows is a series of safe houses where Anne is left while Julien disappears to commit robbery and visit other women. Eventually Anne makes it back to her beloved city:

“Beaten, broken, I’m here all the same; furthermore, as we often said in jail, the winner is the one who gets away. I’m coming back, Paris, with what’s left of me, to start to live and fight again.”

I liked Astragal more than I thought I would. Anne and Julien don’t always behave well, but Sarrazin doesn’t ask the reader to like or excuse them. She also writes beautifully without overwriting:

“I was busting with images anyhow: I’d been locked up too young to have seen much of anything, and I’d read a lot dreamed a lot and lost the thread.”

She also has a hard-won wisdom about the impact her life is having her. It’s not that she unthinkingly follows destructive paths but rather that she does what is familiar to try and improve her situation while knowing how unlikely this is.

“You can’t wash away overnight several years of clockwork routine and constant dissembling of self.”

Sarrazin was undoubtedly a writer of talent, its truly sad that she didn’t live to see what else that talent could produce and where it might have taken her.

To end, this edition features a rhapsodic introduction by Patti Smith “My Albertine, how I adored her!” If you’ll permit me a paraphrase: “My Patti! How I adore her…” Here she is singing about lovers, which I thought was apt for Anne and Julien: