French Leave by Anna Gavalda

French Leave (2009) by Anna Gavalda is a novel about four siblings who reunite after ditching a family wedding. It was originally published in French as L'Échappée Belle (The Beautiful Escape). I read the English translation of the novel by Alison Anderson published by Europa Editions.

The story begins when Simon and his wife Carine pick up Simon’s younger sister Garance to take her to a family wedding. Carine and Garance do not get along, and they spend much of the drive provoking one another. For instance, Garance waxes her legs in the back seat, much to Carine’s dismay (mine too). During the drive, Garance notices that Simon and Carine have had a fight and that her brother is upset.

Simon receives a call from his sister Lola who has decided at the last minute to attend the wedding. She recently got divorced and wasn’t sure if she was up to seeing her family. Lola asks Simon to pick her up too, which further displeases Carine. Once the group reaches the wedding, Simon, Garance, and Lola are disappointed to learn that their brother Vincent will not be there.

The siblings end up escaping the wedding, leaving Carine and their mother behind, to visit Vincent at the chateau he works at. Together, they share old memories, buoy one another up, and bond with a feeling of joyous freedom, before returning to their regular lives the next day. It’s a mainly light, happy read about the bonds between brothers and sisters.

The story was narrated by Garance, and I think I would have enjoyed the novel more if one of the other siblings had been the narrator. Garance was sometimes thoughtful and humorous, but she was also immature and unlikable. She complains that members of Carine’s family insult Arabs, but later calls Nono, Vincent’s co-worker "Way Retarded." She was as judgmental as those she criticized. Moreover, Garance brought a sari to wear to the wedding, but she didn’t seem to know how to properly put it on. She had no reason to dress in one, so it all seemed like an effort to draw attention to herself.

I don’t think the reader was meant to sympathize with Carine at all, but I did at times. It was clear that she was struggling to fit in with her husband’s “cool” siblings, and Simon was aware of her issue. While Simon enjoyed his escape, Carine was trapped alone at a wedding with her husband’s extended family, and Simon had abandoned her. Of all the siblings, I liked Vincent the most, probably because he just seemed to be living his own life happily.

Overall, it was a fun story with a unique idea. I haven’t read many books about adult siblings.

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In Love by Alfred Hayes

In Love (1953) is a novel by Alfred Hayes about the breakup of a relationship. The story is set in New York after World War II, and two main characters are nameless. The narrator is a man who is nearly 40 years old. He’s a writer who has lived in New York City his whole life. He doesn’t have his own home and lives in a hotel. This drifting and inability to commit extends to his relationships. In Chapter 1, the narrator begins telling a story to a pretty girl at a hotel bar. It’s the story of his previous relationship. The next nine chapters describe this relationship and its eventual breakup.

The narrator was involved with a young woman, who was nearly half his age. She was "not yet twenty-two, a mother, divorced, alone." At 17, she got married, and the next year, she had a child. Her marriage ended badly. After her divorce, the woman’s daughter was sent to live with her mother and step-father in the suburbs. The woman dreams of security, commitment, a second loving marriage, a home, and another child. She wants to be "happy, quietly happy, beautifully happy, genuinely happy." She’s often melancholy and quiet. The narrator doesn’t fully understand her.

The woman lives in a tiny studio apartment, and she’s so afraid of potential prowlers that she has a tear-gas gun for her protection. It resembles a fountain pen and sits within reach on her coffee table. The narrator doesn’t take her fears seriously, and he mainly enjoys having pleasurable evenings with her. Beyond that, he’s not interested in providing her with the security she seeks or any form of commitment.

Their routine is turned on its head when the woman goes out with friends and meets a rich man named Howard. Attracted to the woman’s beauty, Howard offers her $1,000 to spend a night with him. As noted in the quote from the The Guardian on the book's back cover and in the book’s introduction, this plotline preceded that of the novel Indecent Proposal and its film adaptation.

The woman arrives home and tells the narrator about the offer, first shrugging it off, but then returning to the idea. She wonders if the money would be tainted. However, it’s such a large sum, and the money could be used to provide for her daughter. She reasons that the narrator would forgive her. It would just be one night. The narrator doesn’t speak up or act in any way to stop her. After having a nightmare that her daughter died, the woman decides to call Howard.

She begins seeing Howard, who treats her to fine dining and fancy outings. Meanwhile, the narrator sees how empty his life is without her. Perhaps, also realizing that his girlfriend was sought after by a rich man, he begins to reassess her value. He now feels that he loves her, and his jealousy and resentment grows. The woman eventually leaves the narrator for Howard, and the narrator takes the loss very badly.

Three months later, the woman calls the narrator late at night. He heads straight to her place. At first, he is grateful to be with her again, and he proposes a trip to the white sand dunes on the New Jersey shore, saying "It would be so nice to go away. The dunes were something we owed each other." Unfortunately, his plan falls apart. It’s late October, and all the little summer places are closed for the season. As they drive on in the cold, the narrator decides to stop in Atlantic City instead. Everything about their trip is going wrong. Instead of trying to make amends, the narrator resents the woman for being silent. Later, in bed, he sexually assaults her to "bring her back," but concludes that, "my taking her as I had, had widened the distance between us; she was still there, wherever the ocean had her, and locked up wherever she was locked up, and I hated her now."

It's a painfully sad scene. After arguing, she dresses, and they leave the hotel just three hours after checking in. Subsequently, the narrator meets a joint friend named Vivian who gossips that Howard refused to marry to the woman, and that’s why she had returned to the narrator. Now angry and vindictive, he decides to blackmail the woman into sleeping with him in exchange for him remaining silent about their relationship. Otherwise, he’ll send Howard a letter, telling him everything.

She arrives at the narrator’s door, and the pair argue. Finally, the narrator decides the woman is free to go. She now offers him a proposition that they continue their affair after she marries Howard, but he refuses. Perhaps, he doesn’t want the power in their relationship to be in her hands. He finally accepts that their relationship is over and sends her off to marry Howard. In the final chapter, the narrator is ready to move on with a new, pretty, young girl. In the end, In Love was not much of a love story after all, but more a story of desperation, possession, power, cruelty, and misunderstanding.

I always read an introduction after finishing a novel to avoid spoilers, so I turned to Frederic Raphael’s introduction to In Love after concluding the story. It was a strange mix of snobby insults and flattering remarks. Most of the remarks on films went over my head. Raphael’s comments on Hayes’ life included a lot of guesswork and seemed poorly researched, unlike most NYRB intros. Raphael seems to define a writer’s success by being an A-lister and sleeping with notorious women, and he hypothesizes, without evidence, that Hayes had a "lack of thrusting ambition" although he notes that Hayes was nominated for an Oscar.

Raphael considers My Face for the World to See, Hayes’ 1958 novel, to be In Love’s "quasi-sequel." Despite the similarities in style, the two novels are unrelated, stand-alone works. Both Raphael and David Thomson, who wrote the introduction for My Face for the World to See, conflate the fictional male narrators of Hayes’ fiction with Hayes himself. However, it’s unfair to assume Hayes shares the opinions of his characters and to consider the novels to be entirely autobiographical.

One thing that put me off about both books was the sexism of the book cover blurbs by NYRB. The back cover of In Love insultingly describes the 21-year-old woman as, "good-looking, if a little past her prime." The back cover of My Face for the World to See describes the 25-year-old woman, saying, "She’s a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures." Meanwhile, the middle-aged male protagonists don’t come under any scrutiny, not for their appearance and not for pursuing young women roughly half their age.

I thought In Love was a compelling, engaging read. I’m glad I read it after reading My Face for the World to See. Hayes is a great writer with a unique style that reveals the inner monologues and thoughts of his characters. Both novels left me thinking. Most of all, I was left wondering how different the stories would be if told from the female perspective.

Related Review:
My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes
The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

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Berry Picking

We went to pick some blueberries, boysenberries, and marionberries at a nearby farm. It was quiet and peaceful. It was nice to have an escape outside. I made a lovely galette with the berries and some fresh apricots.

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Away from Her by Alice Munro

Away from Her (2007) by Alice Munro is a stand-alone republication of the short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" from her 2001 short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. (I read the full collection many years ago). The story was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999, and the magazine republished this early version of the story online in 2013 when Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2006, the story was adapted into a film called Away from Her by the actress and director Sarah Polley. The stand-alone printing of Away from Her was a tie-in with the film’s release, and it has a thoughtful introduction by Polley.

Away from Her is the story of Fiona and her husband Grant. They have been married for nearly 50 years. The story jumps back and forth in time, shedding light on their relationship. Fiona is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and she and Grant have decided it’s time for her to live in a facility called Meadowlake.

The story begins with Fiona’s romantic proposal to Grant on a beach at Port Stanley:

"Do you think it would be fun—" Fiona shouted. "Do you think it would be fun if we got married?"

He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

At first, their marriage seems ideal, but soon the reader learns that Grant was frequently unfaithful to Fiona during his years as a university professor. Strangely, Grant has convinced himself that Fiona never knew of his infidelity, but it’s clear to the reader that she was fully aware of his actions. For instance, Fiona would mimic the voices of women Grant had cheated on her with, women that Grant assumed Fiona had never met.

After Fiona is admitted to Meadowlake, Grant is asked not to visit his wife for 30 days to give her time to adjust to her new setting. When Grant finally visits his wife, she has forgotten him entirely. Fiona is now in a relationship with a man named Aubrey. This turn of events makes Grant an onlooker to his wife’s relationship with another man. Fiona treats Grant politely, as she would any stranger.

As time goes on, Grant wonders out loud if Fiona is playing a charade. Has Fiona really lost her memory? Or could this be a complicated act to make Grant experience what she went thorough? Grant may want to believe that it’s all a charade because coping with being forgotten is so much harder for him. In reading the story, I wondered about Fiona’s motivations. Is this Fiona’s way of punishing Grant and testing his devotion to her? Does Fiona want time away from Grant or time to forget him?

Like Fiona, Aubrey is married. One day, Aubrey’s wife Marian arrives and takes him home from Meadowlake. Fiona becomes sick with grief after Aubrey departs, and Grant worries about her declining health. Nothing he does seems to help.

Grant decides to ask Marian to bring Aubrey back to Meadowlake. After visiting Marian, Grant has the idea of pursuing Marian romantically as part of his plan to reunite his wife with Aubrey. When the story ends, Grant is visiting Fiona to tell her Aubrey will soon be returning, but surprisingly, Fiona now recognizes Grant as her husband. Fiona remarks that Grant could have just left and forsaken her, and he replies, "Not a chance."

The ending of the story is ambiguous. Did Fiona regain her memory of her husband temporarily, or was she acting all along? Will Grant be true to his wife, or will he abandon and forsake her?

Away from Her is a fantastic short story, and Munro is an incredible writer. Her characters are realistic, imperfect, and complex, and her stories always resonate with me and leave me thinking.

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Brave New Girl by Louisa Luna

Brave New Girl by Louisa Luna is a coming-of-age tale that was published by MTV Books in 2001. MTV Books also published Tunnel Vision by Keith Lowe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

The protagonist in Brave New Girl is 14-year-old Doreen Severna. The novel describes her life during the summer between 8th grade and high school. Doreen has an authentic voice of a teenager in the 1990s. She’s sharp, biting, and funny. Like most teens, she answers adults in short sentences, but she shares her full thoughts with the reader.

Doreen’s voice is comparable in many ways to Holden Caulfield’s in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, a classic book about adolescence set in the 1940s. Doreen talks about The Catcher in the Rye below, and I really loved these lines. They made me laugh.

Like Holden Caulfield, Doreen does not fit in. The only person she trusts and cares about is her best friend Ted. Ted is an outcast too, and he has an alcoholic mother. Everyone at school considers them both losers. It doesn’t matter to Doreen and Ted though. They enjoy their time together, hanging out, joking with one another in Ted’s basement, listening to the Pixies, going to Tower Records, smoking, and eating junk food in the parking lot at 7-Eleven or Trader Joe’s. Their families and classmates all think they are dating, but they aren’t.

At home, Doreen’s father lectures her constantly, her mother wants her to be more feminine and have girlfriends, and her older sister Tracey is always unkind to her. Doreen is also troubled by the disappearance of her older brother Henry. He left home or was kicked out ten years ago when he was fourteen, the same age Doreen is now. Her family never talks about Henry, so Doreen doesn’t know where he is or even if he’s alive.

Tracey just graduated high school and is dating an older man named Matthew who is 21. Matthew shows an interest in Doreen and talks to her when others aren’t around. Doreen has a crush on him and is confused when Matthew tells her that he likes her more than he likes her sister. Eventually, Matthew’s behavior takes a dark turn when he rapes Doreen in her own bedroom. Doreen is unable to tell anyone, including Ted. Her family does not notice her pain and confusion. She’s silently suffering, hiding evidence of what happened, vomiting, bleeding, passing out, and crying.

Meanwhile, Ted is beat up by his classmates and is afraid and suffering too. In the end, Doreen finds a way to fight back by telling the truth, which helps her establish a relationship with her father. Unfortunately, her father didn’t take her to a doctor or the police. It was also disappointing that Doreen’s mother was so useless and unsympathetic and that her sister refused to believe her.

Somehow Doreen and Ted both survive their awful summer. I had to wonder where life would take them next.

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Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver’s Cathedral (1983) is a collection of twelve short stories. These stories feature themes of discontent, broken relationships, despair, loss, and detachment. Many of the characters are alcoholics who are unable to change and grow. Overall, it’s a bleak read.

Here are summaries of the short stories contained in the volume:

"Feathers" is the story of the interactions between two couples at a dinner party. Jack and Fran are invited to have dinner at Bud and Olla’s house. Bud and Olla are a happy couple with a new baby and a peacock. Strangely, this visit has negative consequences on Jack and Fran's marriage.

"Chef's House" is about Wes, an alcoholic man, who is renting a home from a recovered alcoholic named Chef. Wes invites his estranged wife Edna to live with him, and they enjoy their time together at Chef’s house. Eventually, Chef tells Wes he must leave the house and move in a month. This loss creates a setback for Wes.

"Preservation" is the story of a stunted man who is unable to leave the sofa after losing his job.

"The Compartment" is about a man named Myers who is taking a train in Europe to meet his estranged son, but then changes his mind at the last minute.

"A Small, Good Thing" is about a couple who loses their child after he is struck by a car on his birthday and how they find comfort in an unlikely place from a baker.

"Vitamins" is a story of a couple struggling with alcoholism, discontent, and infidelity. The following quote about Portland in the story got my attention because I live in the city.



"Careful" is about an alcoholic man named Lloyd who is living separately from his wife Inez, but is still dependent on her.

"Where I'm Calling From" is about men sharing their personal stories of how alcohol ruined their lives while they are drying out at a rehabilitation house.

"The Train" is a story about Miss Dent waiting at a train station and her interactions with two people there. It’s a response to John Cheever’s short story "The Five-Forty-Eight."

"Fever" is about a man named Carlyle who struggles to find a caregiver for his children after his wife leaves him.

"The Bridle" is about a woman named Marge and her observations of a new family that is renting an apartment at the building she manages with her husband.

"Cathedral" is a story narrated by a bigoted man whose wife is preparing for a visit from an old friend who is blind. The narrator grows as he tries to communicate with the blind man and describe and draw a cathedral with him.

The final story was the most enjoyable because it showed growth, connection, and humanity. Carver writes minimalist stories, and for me, many of the stories felt unfinished and dissatisfying.

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