Pauline Delabroy-Allard: Ça raconte Sarah | All about Sarah (2018)

The pronunciation 'sarah' is sandwiched between 'conte', or story. And this is some story, one which Minuit chose alone for its rentrée novel, one which has already won a few literary prizes, and with fourteen other novels is currrently in the prix Goncourt's première selection. Does this first novel deserve all the praise that has been poured on it? In a word, yes.

Not much has been said of the autobiographical content in this novel, so we'll stay clear of that. This novel concerns a young woman who, forced by the circumstances of her partner abandoning her to herself and her child by him, chooses to teach in a lycée to spend more time with her son. But then the whirlwind happens.

The narrator meets Sarah, a successful violinist in a quartet that tours the world, and they meet and see each other a number of times. The narrator has a fixation about latency periods, and asks Sarah what she sees as the meaning. The reply: 'C'est le temps qu'il ya entre deux grands moments importants.' ('It's the time between two greatly important moments.') So there we have it.

The beginning of the women's important moment comes when Sarah tells the narrator that she thinks she's in love with her. That's like striking a match: from nothing, you get fire. Two women, homosexual virgins, begin a highly amorous, highly sexualised affair which can only end in heartbreak. They see each other as often as possible, have sex as often as possible, and when they are not together can only think about each other all the time, about when they can be together again.

This is a self-contained folie à deux, and right from the start the narrator knows that Sarah is seeing a shrink two, even three, times a week. But the madness is infectious, the narrator catches it, she can neither stand to be with Sarah nor without her, they both know they must finish a self-destructive relationship. So Sarah doesn't contact the narrator for some time, but when she does it's to tell her that she has breast cancer. End of the first of two parts, right in the middle of the book.

There are 82 often breathless and frenetic sections in Part 1, but only 30 slowly paced sections in Part 2. Is Sarah dead, has she killed her? A brief trip to Milan, then on to Trieste, to an almost adandoned house where the narrator can breath, look at the wonderful view of Adriatic, try to calm after the storm, bring back her sanity, buy pasta laced with spinach from the local store, drink and drink and drink spritz from the local bar, and. What?