Kurze Inhaltsangabe
Sie ist die Stimme von Paris. Als Bahnhofsansagerin kündigt sie die Züge an – denkt dabei aber einzig an ihn und an den Kuss, der ihr Leben veränderte. In den Straßen der Stadt begegnet sie dem, was das Leben ist, aber sie wartet auf ihn, den sie liebt. Und irgendwann kann er sich ihr nicht mehr entziehen

“They have known each other for a long time. She has never quite been able to recall the moment when they met, the place, the precise day, whether she shook his hand or they kissed on the cheek. Nor has she ever thought to ask him. She does have a first memory, though. As she was climbing into her coat in the narrow hallway of an unkempt apartment, she had caught his look of distress. The woman he had flirted with all evening was refusing to leave with him. He was trying to persuade her with an insistent barrage of words, which fell to pieces in the face of the majestic creature. She thought the idea of being suddenly deprived on the object of his affections must have been more than he could bear just then. And seeing him this way, in love, had moved her. She had slipped between the two of them and said, I’m off. But he had not replied.”

Sigh.

One of the more difficult books I read this month. I was torn between feeling sorry for and being just so irritated by the nameless main character.

Somehow I ended up reading yet another story about a lonely love stuck woman. In love, foolishly oh foolishly so, with another woman’s man.

And she feels it so.

As I suppose does anyone in an unrequited kind of love. It hurts so much yet she cannot let him go.

There is a wistful kind of romance to this story. She is that voice you hear announcing the trains at the Gare du Nord. She has hardly any friends. And seems to be a magnet for weird men. She pretends to be a prostitute, she shoplifts, she is locked into the apartment of a man she had met in a cafe. And there is that hint of a childhood trauma, which is only detailed at the end. She is obviously desperate for attention. Yet she does get people’s attention everyday when she makes her announcements. But hers is a disembodied voice. One that will never be recognized. She makes all these announcements for people departing and arriving, yet she has never left France. It is a rather claustrophobic world that she lives in. I can hardly get a breath in.

So I pity her and yet I cannot stand her. She makes all these infuriating decisions. And I keep wondering, what? What is she doing? Why is she so naive? So foolish? And so I struggle to make my way through this book. I start and stop reading it, because I want also to read more of Curiol’s Parisian world and of her way of noticing the everyday things. And who doesn’t love Paris – or at least the thought of it. Although in the nameless woman’s Paris, there seems to be a predator lurking around every corner (!).

“The Jardin du Luxembourg and its hodge-podge of tourists. Rings of chairs arranged as if for the conversations of invisible characters. It’s up to anyone out for a walk to imagine, according to the layout of these metals remains, what went on here before his arrival.”

So while I didn’t quite enjoy reading it. No that doesn’t sound right. Maybe it’s more like that it was such a challenge reading Voice Over that I am surprised, glad that I managed to finish it.
It was a relief when Voice Over finally came to an end, but voice is vibrant, authentic, exacting. Paul Auster says it so much better in the foreword:

“Curiol’s eye for detail is so sharp, so exact in its renderings of the world beyond her character’s skin, that even as the narrative concentrates on the actions of a single individual, we are simultaneously given a crystal-clear picture of French society at large – the new France, the France of the early twenty-first century.”
( )

Jonge vrouw met jeugdtrauma tracht haar weg te vinden in de grote stad Parijs en beleeft dubieuze en kortstondige liefdesavonturen met diverse mannen. Er is er maar één waar ze echt op valt, maar die is al bezet. Lezenswaardig debuut en beschrijving van het leven in de grote stad in de jaren 00. ( )

Couldn't get into it. ( )

This debut novel by Curiol, a French journalist, was shortlisted for two awards in 2009, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. The main character is a woman in her late twenties who works as an announcer at Paris' Gare du Nord train station. She is an attractive but average woman in her mind, and her coworkers characterize her as cold, withdrawn and strange. She develops an attraction to a man who she has known for a long time, but he is living with another woman, Ange, in what appears to be a happy and stable relationship. One night at a dinner party he kisses her, and she soon is obsessed with him. She continues to see him—and Ange—at social gatherings, and she alleviates her growing despair and longing in alcohol and in meaningless encounters with strange men, including a female impersonator, an unemployed North African immigrant and a controlling psychiatric intern.

The man eventually realizes that she is madly in love with him. Her desire for him increases as they become closer, but her obsession also grows, and her grasp of reality begins to slip.

Reading this taut and captivating novel reminded me of the 1970s movie "Looking for Mr. Goodbar", and of The Guess Who song "Undun", as I wondered what she was going to do next. Definitely recommended. ( )