Grab Instantly The Company Of Ghosts Envisioned By Lydie Salvayre Available As EPub

visão das consequências daª Guerra Mundial em França com base nas memórias e loucura de uma mulher.

Gostei da mensagem do livro mas não muito da forma algo repetitiva como aborda o assunto.
The Company of Ghosts, by Lydie Salvayre,
Translated from the French by Christopher Woodall,
Dalkey Archive Press,. Original: Éditions du Seuil,.
pages.

RIYL: Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, 'The Handmaid's Tale'



"My mother fell silent a few seconds while the processserver inexorably pursued his inventory without realizing that what he was thus making was an inventory of our memories,.
. . an entire history, the objects of which bore marks that only we could read, " p.

There you have, in a nutshell, the scenario of this fascinating short novel by Lydie Salvayre, a French author whose name only recently came to my attention.
In, the novel's teenage narrator, Louisiane, and her mother, Rose, live together in a poor apartment, Rose's memories of the brutal treatment suffered by her own mother and brother under the Vichy state of Phillippe Pétain are never far from her mind when she falls behind on rent payments and the bailiff comes calling, she mistakes him for one of Pétain's thugs, and directs a torrent of obscenity at the confused lawman.
Louisiane, meanwhile, is a mess of conflicting feelings: thrust prematurely into the responsibilities of adulthood by her mother's mental illness, she first tries to appease the processserver with obsequious shows of compliance and plenty of sedatives for Rose, but quickly gives in to the adolescent desire for someone to take her side and hear all the gripes she has about her horrible mother.


The plot, as you'll have gathered from this summary, is rather minimal, and the cast of characters is not large.
It's in the telling of the tale that Salvayre shines: constantly shuttling the narrative focus betweenand, she lets the past speak through the present in a way that is unforced and powerful.
As Rose begins to air out her many grievances, Louisiane, who has heard them all before, must both interrupt for the benefit of the processserver and complete in an aside to the reader her mother's telling.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to know whether the words on the page are Rose's direct speech or Louisiane's secondhand report, owing to the lack of quotation marks.
I suspect this was a deliberate stylistic choice, and I don't fault the author for it: while occasionally disorienting, it never grows distracting.
And each time one of Rose's traumatic recollections or Louisiane's lyrical flights threatens to derail the narrative, Salvayre handily reestablishes us in prosaic reality by reference to the processserver "inexorably pursuing" his grim tour through their apartment.
The processserver, who rarely speaks during the novel, has his say in the The Company of Ghosts's appendix, which was first published separately.
I didn't feel that this section added very much to the work, beyond the mildly scandalous revelation that the processserver regards Marshal Pétain as a great French patriot I hadn't realized that anyone in France subscribed to that particular strain of historical revisionism.
Then again, I'm sure many outside the United States would be shocked to learn that the traitor Robert E.
Lee is still held in high esteem by a number of my countrymen, . .

In closing, I'd like to highlight a passage which suggests the moral importance of this work, and its value for readers today.
In this flashback, Rose is six years old, sitting in the audience at a public ceremony in celebration of motherhood her own mother, an unmarried woman, has not been invited to take part in the festivities, and Rose realizes that her mother's unconventional views have made her a pariah.
This moving scene is as wellwritten as any passage in the novel, but it resonates with me for a special reason: as an American in, I can't help tracing parallels between the Vichy regime and my own country's reactionary conservative movement, lately empowered by the election of President Trump.
One need only consider the list of local notables onstage during the festival to be struck by the affinity:

"I can see.
. . the Mayor, a redwhiteandblue scarf pinned to his massy chest, surrounded by Madame Duvert, the Departmental Delegate to the French Union for the Defense of the Race, Madame Vérine, Member of the Regional Association for Christian Marriage, Abbott Vincent, Chairman of the Association for the Improvement of Public Morals, and Monsieur Perrachon, ViceChairman of the Regional Alliance against Depopulation, a sly and repellent creature who looked rather like this man here, she said with a grimace,

pointing at the processserver, the same hypocritical face, she added for good measure.
" p., emphasis added It is a portrait of generations, of getting older, and of inevitability of death, Not many authors are capable of pulling off what Salvayre does in this withering satire, Through a verbally euphoric comedy, she forces us to see a familiar tragedy in a new light,

The plot follows a simple trajectory: Maitre Echinard, a processserver, visits the home of Rose and her daughter Louisiane to act upon a summons.
As he moves from room to room, itemizing the contents of the apartment, he is accosted by Rose, a reclusive madwoman haunted by the ghosts of the Occupation and the death of her brother Jean at the hands of collaborators in.
Her daughter Louisiane, a sexuallyfrustrated teenager, does her best to shield the unflappable, inhuman process server from the onslaught of her mother's memories and stories.
She fails grandly in this endeavor, often launching into her own monologue, made all the more hilarious and poignant by the seeming indifference of her audience.


The bare outline of the plot does not do justice to Salvayre's erudite and singular voice.
Rose and Louisiane are as at home quoting Epictetus and Seneca as they are revealing sexual desires and murderous plots.
A typical paragraph, this one spoken by Louisiane, runs as follows:

"Sometimes, Monsieur, a spasm of anxiety grips my chest, it really hurts.
I lie down on my bed, I feel as if I'm sinking, I'd like to be somewhere else, . . At six o'clock I watch my soap on Channel Two, At seven o'clock I watch my soap on Channel One, I prefer the latter. The leading actor has dark hair and green eyes and I like men with dark hair and green eyes.
I have no other activities, It seems there are quite a number of us in this situation, "

Dalkey Archive has appended to the end of the novel Salvayre's brief manual, "Some Useful Advice for Apprentice ProcessServers," in which Maitre Echinard has a chance to offer his take on the events recounted in the novel proper.
This book made me reet proppa melancholy, as they say in the North of England, By this, I dont mean the sort of heartsick longing melancholy one finds in a Camera Obscura LP or a French classic, I mean fullon Weltschmerzthe sort of sadness that takes all week to shake off.
You roll around on the floor, beating the boards, cursing the naturally evolving world constructed within a naturally evolving series of universes and multiverses, desperate for a better tomorrow for you and your children or, if no children, you pray for the opportunity to ever have children with an actual woman.
This preamble, you may have observed, is a typical MJ ploy to fill the review box with my own ramblings, and thus hook the reader into caring about the book.
Dont you dare start skipping! This novel takes place in a French slum in, when a processserver or repo man arrives to make an inventory of the repossessable items in the hovel of a mother and her daughter.
The mother is tormented by memories of Nazi thugs in her childhood and torments her daughter by eloquently recounting these memories in detail before lapsing into endless tormented screams.
Meanwhile, the virginal daughter is tormented by romantic longing and her own murderous thoughts, Torment is the operative. Like Salvayres The Power of Flies, this novel probes in dark psyches, unflinching in its wartsandmorewarts depiction of how the vilest aspects of our pasts invade our present.
The novel suffers from a lack of focus and stretching the conceit too far plus confusion as to who is narrating.
The bonus short story here is a dark Swiftian piece that seems chillingly real, .