The year is 1997. Mathieu is only forty and has just had an operation for a tumour on his lung, and although it will take him some time to recover, the doctor rather dismissively tells him that he'll cure if he changes his lifestyle: no more two packets of cigarettes a day, and a life free from stress. His mother lives in Paris, having to move to a city to find work, and his wife Odile is a city woman. But some time before, when Mathieu was between three years of age and eleven, he lived with his grandparents Paul and Louise near Bayac in the Quercy: Signol was born in Quatre-Routes-du-Lot in the Quercy.
To recuperate, Mathieu decides to see the grandparents he's not seen in ten years, and receives a very warm welcome. Paul is in his late seventies but is still very mobile, still making horse shoes even though he sold his last one in the 1960s, and still fishing (technically illegally). Louise was a midwife, although now that everyone goes to hospital she's found a new interest in making different concoctions from herbs: in fact, the whole book is shot through with the names of herbs, fish, birds, cooking and different smells. Mathieu's lung still hurts, he has a few funny turns, but he's re-living his youth.
All three people have deep scars: Louise, before the birth of Mathieu, lost her child and sees his new incarnation in Mathieu; and Paul bitterly regrets returning to Germany towards the end of the war and killing teenage soldiers who had no knowledge of Nazism: when his hammer fiercely strikes the metal on the anvil, he's really striking himself.
Both Louise and Paul have a different kind of wisdom: Louise is more accepting, hopeful, she can 'tame the unknown', whereas Paul is full of refusal, anger and rebellion. But they're both rebelling against the steamroller of the economic imperative, they're self-sufficient, even re-start baking their own bread. Paul is building walls for the people who'll return, and though this is not the Côte d'Azur, he really believes they will return. Forced to go back to Paris for medical tests, Mathieu feels much bettter physically, and much better mentally now he's got back in tune with his past.
I found this book much better than Au cœur des foréts, the only other book of Signol's I've read, as I understand much better now what he's doing.
My Christian Signol posts:
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Christian Signol: Dans la paix des saisons
Christian Signol: Au cœur des forêts
After reading a book of interviews, and novel and a play by Bernard-Marie Koltès, Christian Signol (a very popular writer, but not in the same way as, say, Marc Levy or Guillaume Musso) pulled me back to earth with such a jolt that I'm still wondering 'What happened?'. Signol was born in Quercy (Quatre-Routes-du-Lot) in 1947, and has since 1984 published at least one book a year. And they're not short, as this one is over three hundred pages.
I question how much revision Signol subjects his books to, as in the beginning of this book at least there are a number of repetitions, although this novel taught me a number of things about trees, such as oaks take far longer to mature than spruces, and so on. But trees are very much the main characters in this novel, in which the ageing first person narrator Bastien owns a reasonably sized plantation: he knows that trees have to breathe, can feel pain.
Essentially this is the story of Bastien's life among the trees, of his memories, and of the present, in which his grand-daughter Charlotte comes to stay with him several times, and is very interested in family history, particularly in the disappearance long ago of Bastien's sister Justine, but of course Charlotte is technologically clued up and can research things on the internet that Bastien has no idea of.
So, hovering around Bastien's business with trees is an unsolved mystery that has haunted him for decades. So too is his memory of his father's concerns for a seriously wounded German soldier in World War II: most French people would have left him to die or have finished him off, especially members of the Resistance, people such as Bastien's father. But no, his father had a heart.
The story of the German soldier fascinates Charlotte as much as the fate of Justine, and she Googles for some time, finally resolving the mystery: the dying soldier passed on his address to Justine who told him she'd visit his family after the war to tell them how he died, which she does and ends up marrying the German's brother, and her daughter Magda (the result of the marriage) Charlotte tracks down so she (Magda) can visit Bastien to tell him the story, and of how Justine lost her life in a car crash in the 1960s, never daring to tell her whereabouts to her family, especially to her mother who'd lost her brother in a Nazi atrocity in the village.
Yeah, I know. Highly readable, but I won't jump at the chance to read too many of the novels Christian Signol churns out.
My Christian Signol posts:
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Christian Signol: Dans la paix des saisons
Christian Signol: Au cœur des forêts
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