Company of Ghosts (French Literature) - Tapa blanda

"There are innocuous books that charm you, gently surprise you at moments you didn't expect, blissfully put you to sleep, make you dream of princes and princesses....But there are others, like Lydie Salvayre's 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."

."..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

..".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

When a process-server 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 distrainees Rose Melie and her teenage daughter Louisiane is more than he has bargained for. Rose, forever unhinged by the trauma of a childhood spent under the Nazi occupation, mistakes him for a collaborationist thug and assails him with her alternately tragic and hilarious memories. Louisiane, for her part, treats the process-server to an exaggerated display of courtesy laced with precocious erudition and a stream of late-pubescent revelations. In a narrative that lurches giddily between 1942 and 1997, Lydie Salvayre picks at the sores of recent French history, while exposing patterns of authoritarianism. In Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers - a short piece also included in this book - the author grants the process-server a right of reply, which he uses to chilling effect.