March 28, 2011
For those who still assume all French literature is intellectual or existential, Gavalda (Hunting and Gathering), a translator and bestselling author in Europe, is the clear antidote. Her anecdotal latest follows Simon and his two sisters, Lola and Garance, as they escape a cousin's countryside wedding (and Simon's persnickety wife, Carine), fleeing from the church to seek out their brother, Vincent, who is impersonating a pauperized aristocrat while working as a tour guide in a local chateau. The siblings spend an indulgent afternoon together, starkly delineating the difference between Paris and the rest of France. Narrator Garance ridicules nearly everyone except her family, upon whom she lavishes continuous praise. Her urbane siblings are "those sublime losers," and her mother is "graceful, charming, full of energy, elegant, so much class.... A typical Parisienne." However, the author's effort fails as both pastiche and social commentary; her take on the provinces and the sorry souls who inhabit them is ungenerous and trite, while the narrator's no-less-distinctive Parisian parochialism goes unchecked and unexamined. Though undeniably funny at times, especially when the author takes aim at such easily lampooned cultural archetypes as the conservative, predictable, hygiene-obsessed pharmacist, Carine, the novel never gathers any steam and finally peters out with a three-page iPod playlist, which brings bittersweet tears to Garance and, to the reader, tears of boredom.
March 1, 2011
A family reunion of sorts, in which four siblings re-gather, reminisce and then once again split apart.
We first meet the narrator, Garance, when she's on the way to a family wedding, one she doesn't particularly care to attend, with her brother Simon and his insufferable wife Carine. Simon is calm and quietly dignified and doesn't seem to deserve his wife's quirkiness—her fear of germs, for example, or her refusal to wear a seatbelt because it gives her claustrophobia. (We later find out from Simon that Carine is quite different—and much more sympathetic—when Simon's siblings aren't around; that she's in fact jealous of the closeness Simon shares with his sisters.) On the way to the wedding—and much to Carine's annoyance—they stop to pick up older sister Lola, an artist whose marriage has fallen apart. Just before the wedding, Garance, Simon and Lola spontaneously take off to visit their younger brother Vincent at "his" chateau—not a family estate but rather the place where he lives as a caretaker and visitors' guide. They arrive just in time to find Vincent making up stories about the chateau's supposedly haunted past, fantasies he crafts out of a vivid imagination that are eaten up by the visiting "hicks." For one languorous and nostalgic day, the siblings talk, swim, listen to music and reminisce about their past. It's clear they miss the closeness they once had, and even semi-cynical Garance recognizes the importance of this "borrowed time, an interlude, a moment of grace" that the four of them briefly share.
A slight novel with great—and eventually moving—insights into the dynamics of family life.
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