Marie Cardinal: La Clé sur la porte | The Key of the Door (1972)

Like Marie Cardinal's more famous Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It (1975), La Clé sur la porte (trans. as The Key of the Door) is autobiographical. In this earlier novel, a woman in her early forties – married to a man called Jean-Pierre who works in Montreal – lives in France with two daughters and a son, although the names of the children are changed here: Grégoire (18), Charlotte (16), and Dorothée (14). Like Marie Cardinal (whose name isn't mentioned in the book), the narrator has suffered a terrible childhood as a pied-noir with an abusive, egotistical, hypocritical Catholic mother who told her daughter at a young age that she had made a number of attempts to abort her. The narrator seeks to ensure that her children don't have the same miserable childhood as her.

And both the children and the mother undergo a deep learning curve in the process. Her children are adolescents during the hippie period, a time of experiments with drugs, casual sex, rock music, free-thinking, and a general attitude that is far more relaxed than the narrator's contemporaries experienced in France during her youth.

I'd have translated the title as 'The key in the door', but there we have it. Because that is exactly what the book is about: the mother leaving the key in the door at all times, including when she goes out to work, meaning that not only are the teenage children allowed to come and go as they please, but so are their schoolfriends. In fact, the flat is open house, meaning that it is full of the sound of teenagers, the sound of youth, and Youth is now a highly exploited commodity, biscuit city for the capitalistic economy which is so hated by both the mother and her children.

But then there are contradictions, as all will learn: the teenagers and their friends believe that they are escaping from bourgeois society, when they are merely escaping into another kind of bourgeois trap, another set of conventions: they (or at least many of their friends), are just as débiles as the people they criticise.

In a word, of course, the utopia becomes dystopian: the mother, and indeed her children, are wide open to abuse, particularly when the aimless, parasitic young Amerloques (Yanks) descend on them, and even more so when other 'friends' steal highly valuable items from the narrator. A very interesting read.

My Marie Cardinal posts:
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Marie Cardinal: La Clé sur la porte | The Key of the Door
Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It