Colombe Schneck: Sœurs de miséricorde (2015)

'Sisters of Misery' is a good title for this book, as the resilient women have a hard time with life, and not only if they are not born on the wealthy side of the tracks. What makes this book different is not just that it looks at things from a feminist angle, but that it essentially takes things from the point of view of an immigrant from a country not normally dealt with in western literature: Bolivia. Not that in the end the country itself matters that much, as similar experiences could be told of immigrants from any country in central or South America, or many other places in the world. As the protagonist Azul generalises: 'L'amour, c'est de la merde, et le mariage la prison' ('Love is shit and marriage prison.')

As she should know because she has a mother from tiny, undeveloped Chuqui-Chuqui, where her father, who dies leaving offspring by his various conquests scattered about, also leaves her mother Ximena with nine children to look after. Leaving school at a very early age and departing to Santa Cruz, the economic capital, sending money back home to support the family is the norm. With two children by two lovers, Azul decides that she wants no more and leaves for Italy intent on sending money back to her family: Ximena, her children Miguel and Alondra and her partner Moise. After working as a domestic for a year, she returns to Bolivia with over 7000 euros.

Men in this book are self-serving, certainly, but also ineffectual. Moise has re-mortaged the house and squandered the money Azul's been sending them on gambling: he's in debt, and it's been rather fruitless that his partner has been painstakingly saving any money she could to keep the family going.

She decides to go back to Europe, to Saint-Ouen just outside the périphérique in Paris, where her cousin has a room for her. Nuns help her to learn the new language, and she also learns, after trying out jobs as a domestic to various families, just which ones she can trust to avoid being taken advantage of in so many ways. Madame Isabelle, a rich wife with her own problems, befriends her as she can. France becomes home and her children join her, although Moise has no intention of leaving the life he knows. Her native country becomes part of her past.

I once knew a Bolivian who was going to Germany to study to be a doctor. I mentioned him returning home after, but he looked at me as if I'd said something silly: 'I can't, can I?' Cue for Thomas Wolfe to say you can't go home again.