Company of Ghosts
Lydie Salvayre author Christopher Woodall translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press
Published:19th Jan '06
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When a bailiff turns up, a teenager tries to salvage her mother, their dignity and the TV. When a bailiff arrives at a housing project on the edge of Paris to draw up a routine inventory of goods in view of seizure, the reception he receives from Rose Melle and her teenage daughter is more than he has bargained for. Rose, forever unhinged by the trauma of childhood spent under Nazi occupation, mistakes him for a collaborationist thug and assails him with her alternately tragic and hilarious memories of Vichy France. In a narrative that lurches giddily between 1942 and 1997, Salvayre picks at the sores of recent French history, exposing its continuing authoritarianism. "The Company Of Ghosts" won the Prix Novembre in France.
"...novels that make you sit up and take notice, that directly confront you, that shake you up from the very first sentence, warning you that the test is going to be brutal, the dream is going to be dark, and the princess's smile is going to be painful."--Le Monde
ISBN: 9781564783509
Dimensions: 198mm x 160mm x 15mm
Weight: 222g
184 pages