This story makes no claim to a happy end. No denying it. But it is also the most impressive novel about the mother-child relationship I have ever read. Where do the boundaries of the mother end and a child’s start? When does love cross the border into violence. What happens when a mother fails to realize that her fears have nothing to do with her children’s reality? 

In this short novel we see the world through the eyes of a mother for whom life is dark and dangerous. The outside reality seems to confirm her inner fears. She takes two young sons on a seaside trip, only to find a grey and rainy place. The hotel is shabby, the room as big as the bed, there is no sea outside their window but a wall. In the café the men laugh about women and at the funfair someone knocks the ice cream out of her son’s hand. She wants to protect her children. She doesn’t want them to realize one day her inadequacies as a mother, She doesn’t want them to become men who laugh about dirty jokes. She believes that only she can keep her children safe.

This is an incredible sad and beautifully tender story focusing on a mother’s irrational fears. The simple first person narrative has a bald, unsophisticated quality that achieves a momentum and elegance all its own. But it is the highly accomplished, skillfully subtle structure of the text that makes us aware that we are here in the hands of an impressive writer. Veronique Olmi knows exactly what she is doing.

After reading this book I felt strangely happy – bizarrely so as it is such a tragic story. However, I realized that I had just been given the opportunity to contemplate an aspect of the mother-child relationship we deny all too often. Simply an amazing, courageous novel.
 

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

120pp, Paperback, £8.99
February 2010
ISBN 978-0-9562840-2-0
English World Rights