Marie Sizun

Décidée à vendre la maison du Finistère, où depuis l'enfance, elle passait ses vacances en famille, parce que restée seule, elle n'en a plus l'usage, et surtout parce que les souvenirs qu'elle garde de ce temps sont loin d'être heureux,
Claire prend un congé d'une semaine de son bureau parisien pour régler l'affaire. Elle se rend sur place en voiture un dimanche d'octobre. Arrivée chez elle, une bien mauvaise surprise l'attend. Son projet va en être bouleversé.
Cela pourrait être le début d'un roman policier. Il n'en est rien ou presque. L'enquête à laquelle la narratrice se voit soumise n'est que prétexte à une remontée des souvenirs attachés à cette maison autrement dramatique pour elle.
Et si, à près de cinquante ans, elle faisait enfin le point sur elle-même et les siens?
Dans La Maison de Bretagne, Marie Sizun reprend le fil de sa trajectoire littéraire et retrouve le thème dans lequel elle excelle : les histoires de famille. Il suffit d'une maison, lieu de souvenirs s'il en est, pour que le passé non réglé refasse surface. L'énigme d'une mère, l'absence d'un père, les rapports houleux avec une sœur, voici la maniere vivante de ce livre. Mais comme son titre l'indique, c'est aussi une déclaration d'amour à la Bretagne, à ses ciels chahutés et sa lumière grandiose, à l'ambiance hors du temps de ce village du bout des terres, face à l'Océan, où le sentiment de familiarité se mêle à l'étrangeté due à une longue absence.… (altro)

This is quite a short story of a young child and the conflict that love causes.
France is not called that, she'd referred to as "The child" almost throughout doesn;t know her father, who left Paris to fight before she was born. She's now 4 or so and is happily living life with her mother, who she loves intensely. Things start to change when she hears that her Daddy will be comming home. She asks a prescient question of her mother, will mother love the child more than the father - to which the mother say yes. To the child, love is a bit like a cake, and that any love given to the father is love taken away from the child. I'm not sure love works like that, but it is one possible conclusion.
The father returns home and the child suffers as the parents restablish a relaitonship that seems to have little time for the child. She balances between them, seemingly not the centre of attention of either. The father is also suffering the aftereffects of having been a POW (we assume) and is somewhat volatile. Gradually things settle and she is able to establish a relationship with him - one that supercedes the relationship with her mother.
And then the child, unknowingly, tells her father a secret, wanting to bring him even closer, and ends up changing everything for ever.
The story is told somewhat disjointedly, the child can't always remember timing or events in detail, there is a sense of things happeneing and then there are details that go on to be memories. That rings true to me, I have a number of very details freeze fram memories from my childhood, accompanied by a more general sense of the period. There is, layered on that, a more adult understanding of the time and what happened, such that you're almost seeing the story in stereo.
The final chapter is haunting and beautiful and heart rending all at once and brought a lump to my throat.
A girl's relationship with her father is usually formative, in this you see it formed and fractured in a short period of time, and regret that it was out of the child's hands to repair.… (altro)

A beautifully written exploration of "three's a crowd", takes place in wartime France, when the child's father returns from fighting. The child (also called France -- there's another reading of the book to consider...) does not remember the time when her father was present, and the family dynamic shifts and stirs in the now claustrophobic apartment. Told through the child's view, it captures well the difference in the world from adult and children's perspectives, where the relative importance of objects and events can differ enormously. We also get good sense of the adult mind states too, especially the father as he adjusts to recovery at home and getting to know his daughter.

This is the second book in Peirene's 2016 "Fairy tale: end of innocence" series. The link is subtle and clever -- this is no run-of-the-mill modern retelling, but rather takes and subverts some the themes (quests, returns, step-parents, awakenings) into a very relatable story. And like all good fairy tales, Freud is hovering somewhere nearby.

The book (in English translation by Adriana Hunter) is written with a deceptively light touch, as befits a child's view of the world, and is one of those well-paced books which doesn't outstay it's welcome which Peirene have come to specialise so well in.… (altro)