Sanaë LemoineRecensioni

There is some beautiful writing here about food and about Paris, two of my favorite things. In the writing I recognized the sensual caress of a perfectly cooked soft egg (with a whisper of vinegar - a thing I first ate on my first trip to Paris), the knee-buckling silkiness of fresh burrata, the perfect creaminess (just barely sweet enough) of a well prepared pear clafoutis. I may not have been eating what the characters ate but I have memories of beautiful meals that can get me to that experience. So too I recognized Paris, the color of the light like nowhere else, the almost metallic tang of old beautiful buildings in the Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin, and the shifts in everything (light, sound, smell, architecture) as you trudge over the really long Pont Notre Dame. Again I recognized that city and I think I would have had a great sense of it even if I had never been, It was lovely to experience the city that way - especially now when its going to be so long before we get to travel again. So great job on the atmosphere but there was something more important I did not recognize. I did not recognize any of these characters.

Margot was like what a 16 year old thinks she appears to be in her best moments. She is intellectual, worldly (despite never having left France as far as I can tell) able to trade witticisms based in philosophy, drama, literature, art and science with journalists, actors, and academics. She is possessed of that enviable sangfroid unique to Parisians. Though Margot is just 16 she is completely unaffected when a boy she has just fucked in back room at a party pretends he does not know who she is and only slightly rattled when a completely crazy adult threatens the foundations of her existence. I don't know that girl. I know the girl who wants to be that girl, but I don't actually know that girl. That sangfroid is inherited from her mother who is balancing life as a stage actress and as a single parent by ignoring her child about 90% of the time and then dramatically making it clear that this apparent abdication of duty was all a grand plan to create a brilliant and independent woman. You're welcome. I don't know this woman. The aforementioned crazy lady and her husband, I don't know them either -- no yes I do, they were in Diary of a Mad Housewife.

Lemoine writes evocative food and great Paris and pretty decent passionless sex but she doesn't write realistic people. I love many books with characters who are nothing like me, Nathan Zuckerman (various Philip Roth), Ifemelu (Americanah), Lizzy Bennet, Gogol (The Namesake), Jay Gatsby, Pip, Antonia (My Antonia), Anne Shirley (of Green Gables), I could go on and on -- they are nothing like me, but there is some shared spark of humanity that connects me to these people with very different stories from my own. There was no spark here. Even the mean characters in books come to be like frends for a bit, Sometimes they are friends you don't like, but we all have friends we don't like. But here, sadly, I felt pas d'amitié. There is just nothing recognizable to latch onto in any of these people.½

The Margot of the title is the teenaged love child of a French actress and a married politician who tires of being her parents' secret and outs the relationship in the press. The novel is full of complicated relationships, all of which become even more difficult because of Margot's impetuous decision.

Set in Paris, the book is a love-letter to the City of Lights with vivid descriptions of its neighborhoods and parks, its food and drink, and its traditions and culture. Lemoine writes beautifully and her words draw you into Margot's world. Part coming-of-age story, part family drama, The Margot Affair can be frustrating at times - the pacing is slow and it's not a story where a lot happens but things pick up considerably in part two. I wasn't sure how Lemoine would resolve Margot's predicament but the ending was satisfying and felt true to the characters.

Thank you to NetGalley, Hogarth (Penguin Random House) and the author for an advanced copy of the novel in exchange for my unbiased review.

Dear Margot Affair, it’s not you...it’s me. I’ve been complaining about angsty young narrator novels where nothing really happens for a while, but I think I have finally hit my limit. There’s nothing particularly wrong with The Margot Affair; in fact, Sanae Lemoine has a knack for capturing small details--eyelashes, fabric, shadows--that evoke a deep sense of place and atmosphere. In this case, it’s Paris, where Margot has always known that her father was married to another woman, but she loves him and cherishes the time he spends with her and her mother, Anouk. Now in her last year of high school, she wants more from him, and tries to figure out how to make that happen. If that sounds like an intriguing plot, it is--but there’s just not enough of it. A large percentage of the novel involves characters remembering stories or telling anecdotes about other people--such as getting caught imitating another girl’s handwriting, or a mother abandoning her children on a train--as a means of illuminating some unknown aspect of their character. Also long, quotation mark-less conversation about these memories, or other seemingly mundane occurrences abound. It’s all quite well done, but just one too many plot-light character-heavy books for me. If you loved Normal People, Exciting Times, Pizza Girl, etc. then add this one to the pile.

When you are a teenager you feel you can bend the world the way you want. Margot is 17, the daughter of the French Culture Minister and his mistress. Margot has never envisioned her father’s wife as a real person. But when Margot and her mother spy on her father’s wife, she realizes how real the wife is. Margot decides tell a journalist about their family hoping to jolt her father into action. But does it really help or ruin two people she loves.

When Margot is seventeen and preparing for her final exams, her family circumstances make it into the press. Margot lives with her mother, and while her father visits when he can, he has his own family who don't know about his other life. He's also the French Minister of Culture. Margot's mother is an actor and has raised Margot to be self-sufficient, but that lack of nurturing leaves her vulnerable. The novel follows Margot as she struggles to come to terms with and to understand her parents and herself, just as journalists are eager to hear from her.

There are shades of Mitterrand's secret daughter, but this was clearly just a jumping off point for Lemoine's novel, which is less about the press attention than it is about Margot struggling with her feelings about her odd family and, perhaps because this is a French novel, the things I expected to find in it were absent. Margot's story is far more interesting and nuanced than I'd expected.½

It has always been like this: her father would visit them every other day, sometimes they did not hear of him for weeks. But when he opened the door, he was there completely for Margot Louve and her mother Anouk. No holidays together, no show up at school events, he only belonged to their private life and for the world outside their Paris apartment, there simply was no father. Nobody knew who he was because everybody knew him. He was a public man, a well-known politician and the husband of another woman. When Margot meets a journalist, the idea of going public with their story pops up, thus forcing him to finally decide between the two lives and families. She is sure that he loves her and her mother much more than his actual wife and therefore, she sets in motion a chain of events with an outcome she would never have imagined.

Sanaë Lemoine’s story of course immediately reminds the reader of the former French presidents Mitterrand’s double life which he only revealed shortly before his death thus making Mazarine Pingeot suddenly one of the most famous daughters of the country. The author does not try to hide the parallels, she even mentions and integrates the real life events in her novel thus underlining also the differences between the two. Written from the daughter’s perspective, she convincingly gives the voice to a young woman full of insecurities and marked by her quite naturally limited understanding of her parents’ affair.

I totally adored the first part of the novel which focuses on Margot and her relationship with her father. She does not question her life and the fact that she can never talk about who her father is, knowing that he loves her deeply is enough for herself and the arrangements also seems to work well for her mother. When the two of them accidentally encounter her father’s wife, something in her is set in motion and it only needs a little pushing by a journalist to develop her fatal plot. She is too young to foresee the scope of her action and what the possible outcomes are.

In the second part, unfortunately, the author lost me a bit with the shift of the focus. Margot is fascinated by a woman a couple of years her senior and the journalist’s wife. Brigitte is a strong contrast to her always distanced and rather cold and controlled mother and fills some kind of emotional gap that opened in her life. For the reader it is quite obvious that she is to a certain extent lured on to destruction and falls prey to the reckless woman. Even though the development between them is well portrayed and slowly moves towards the final blow, Margot lost a bit of her charming personality for me and the reflective and thoughtful young woman turns into a naïve and emotionally dependent girl which I did not really like to follow anymore that much.

A psychologically interesting novel about relationships and emotional needs of children and their parents, but also a study of how the choices of life you make always will have an impact on other people, too.