Adeline Dieudonné: La Vraie Vie | Real Life (2018)

What to do on a wet day in France? Read a book found in a boîte à lire is one possibility, and I've been meaning to read Adeline Dieudonné's first novel La Vraie Vie since it came out three years ago. A popular novel translated into numerous languages isn't normally my idea of fun, but this appeared to be somewhat stranger than the normal popular fare: and it is!

Holding a suspension of disbelief as to how an amusement park employee (the unnamed (at first ten-year-old) narrator's equally unnamed father) could find the money to go around the world and hunt game, or that the same (slightly older) girl can afford to pay an emeritus professor to give her advanced physics lessons out of what she earns through babysitting, this is still some story.

And the fact that it pays off, that the reader continues to read with great relish, is testimony to Dieudonné's writing skills. So what is this about? Well, anyone who glances at the blurb can see it's about a family who live in a house with four bedrooms: the narrator's, her younger brother Gille's, her parents', and that of 'the bodies'. We later learn that the bodies are of wild animals as the father – whose is interested mainly in hunting wild animals, watching television, drinking Glenfiddich, but above all controlling his family: he's a self-obsessed tyrant. And he's very violent towards his wife, whom the narrator calls an amoeba.

The book, however, isn't just about a dysfunctional family, but also about a highly gifted young girl growing up, how she copes with her many problems, even how she attempts to solve them by wishing to turn back history to before a specific traumatic moment in childhood. I'm not too sure what you're left with after the end, but the journey through the novel is rivetting enough.

Various: Une nuit à l'hôtel (2019)

This is a collection of eleven short stories, all written by prominent authors, and all having a night in a hotel as the theme. We need books like this, which give us not only an idea of what authorial talent is around, but also perhaps a hint of who we'd like to read more of, or not at all. I particularly appreciated the stories by Cécile Coulon, Nina Bouraoui, Adeline Dieudonné, Franck Bouysse and Négar Djavani.

The stories:

Cécile Coulon, 'Madame Andrée' –  A woman goes to a hotel to have a lesson on playing the flute from her former teacher, although everything is in her mind.

Serge Joncour, 'Une nuit, presque à l'hôtel'  – A man sleeps in a deckchair by the hotel swimming pool because, well, he can't stand duvets: he's an eiderdown salesman.

Nina Bouraoui, 'Une nuit à Timinoun' – A woman with homosexual sympathies admires a young female guest in a hotel after fleeing from her husband, children, and the asphyxiating normality.

Silvain Prudhomme, 'La Femme au couteau' – A guy remembers his university back-backing days, particularly staying in a bug-ridden hotel and being greeted by a woman with a knife.

Adeline Dieudonné, 'Alika' – The hell of a child minder from the Philippines come to France to what amounts to slavery.

Franck Bouysse, 'Ma Lumière' – A clever young boy lives in hotels with his mother who perhaps works as a cleaner, but also as a prostitute.

Négar Djavani, 'Le Dernier' – After twenty-two years a cop tracks down a serial killer who has set up a new life in Buenos Aires.

Caryl Férey, 'Juste pour un jour' – The punk era by the Berlin wall, the title of course being a translation from David Bowie's 'Heroes'.

Ingrid Astier, 'Fil de soie' – A man, dumped by his girlfriend, arrives at a hotel where there's a 'telepathic' barman.

Régis Jauffret, '¡Alzheimer! ¡Que buéno! Y Macrón! ¡También!'  – An insane rant from a hotel (or psychiatric hospital?) in which virtually every sentence ends in an exclamation mark!

Valérie Zénatti, 'Le Miroir de Cirta' – A young French woman traces her mother's and her grandmother's Algeria, before they were forced to emigrate to France.