In these three slim, yet amazingly potent, novels, French author
Redonnet (translated into English here for the first time) creates
a triptych joined by theme, symbol, voice, style, and temperament.
In the first book, Hotel Splendid, an unnamed narrator struggles to
run the family hotel, which was the epitome of convenience in her
grandmother's day but now suffers daily plagues of rats, rotting
wood, failing plumbing, leaky roofs, and floods and bacteria from
the swamp on which it was built. If this isn't enough, she also
cares for two harping sisters: Ada, the sickly one, and Adel, the
failed actress. In the second novel, Forever Valley, a teenage
girl, one of three inhabitants of a hamlet that lost its villagers
to another valley below it, comes of age when the parish father,
whom she looks after, sends her to become a prostitute in the dance
hall across the road. This new independence allows her to pursue a
project of looking for the dead by digging pits in the parish
garden - but instead of skeletons, she discovers the water that
will soon flood Forever Valley and bring electricity to the valley
below. Finally, Rose Mellie Rose tells the story of Mellie, an
abandoned baby raised by an old woman named Rose in a souvenir shop
on a waterfall miles from the nearest town. Rose dies when Mellie
turns 12; Mellie gets her period, travels to town, has sex with the
truck driver who gives her a ride, discovers that she lives on an
island, learns to read and write, becomes a municipal worker,
marries a failing fisherman who refuses to accept that the lagoon
has gone dry, gets pregnant, leaves her baby (also named Rose) in
the grotto where Mellie herself was found as an infant, and,
hemorrhaging, goes to the beach to die. Any reader will see that
these tales have much in common. Each features a commanding female
protagonist trapped in her place of origin, neither able nor
wanting to escape from the home that gave her life but which now
threatens to destroy her. The narrator of Hotel Splendid never
questions her doomed quest to keep the establishment running, the
girl in Forever Valley leaves only when dam construction forces her
to, and Mellie turns down several job offers on the continent and
submits to nature's call to death. Redonnet's prose reads like the
barest poetry, devoid of description, while still managing to paint
vivid pictures of the rich landscapes that play a vital role in
every story. Most impressively, these three tales represent an
evolution of the feminine from the alienated, sexless martyr to the
prostituted prepubescent on the verge of self-knowledge to the
self-loving, self-determined Mellie, who dies to give her baby a
chance at a better life. To her credit, Redonnet packs these jewels
with much more: highly personal images of utopia, the importance of
heritage, the necessity of burying the dead to approach the future.
Like traveling a very long, very dark tunnel into a blinding,
bright, beautiful light. (Kirkus Reviews)
These three short novels are the first works to appear in English
by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in
Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban
"lycee" before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since
her volume of poetry "Le Mort & Cie" appeared in 1985, she has
published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three
dramatic works.
In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels,
"unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters
nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a
triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a
whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. "Hotel Splendid
"recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit
hotel on the edge of a swamp; "Forever Valley "is about a
sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the
dead; "Rose Mellie Rose" is the story of another adolescent girl
who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the
dying town of Oat.
Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged
the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her
literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great
master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide
almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence,"
Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation
that borders on the triumphant. . . . They] retain even in the
darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above
all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid
in the end."
General
Imprint: |
Bison Books
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
European Women Writers |
Release date: |
September 1994 |
First published: |
September 1994 |
Authors: |
Marie Redonnet
|
Translators: |
Jordan Stump
|
Dimensions: |
191 x 121 x 8mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
117 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8032-8953-6 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General
|
LSN: |
0-8032-8953-7 |
Barcode: |
9780803289536 |
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