PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Delphine de Vigan is the author of No and Me, which was a bestseller in France (400,000 copies) and was awarded the Prix des Libraires (The Booksellers' Prize) in 2008 and in Britain was a Richard and Judy selection where it has sold more than 70,000 copies. Her other novels include Les Jolis Garcons and Soir de decembre. Underground Time was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in 2009. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Paris. George Miller is the translator of No and Me and Underground Time. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique's English-language edition, and the translator of Conversations with my Gardener by Henri Cueco, Inside Al-Qaeda by Mohammed Sifaoui and Disordered World by Amin Maalouf.
Devastating ambivalent narrative, an emphatic and candid family memoir that is presented as autofiction ... An unsettling and raw monologue, even more so because of the cool control de Vigan sustains ... The only way to read this book is to stop, put it down, gasp, absorb the horrors and then read on. Shortlisted for eight major literary awards in France, it won two, and it is easy to see why. It is an overpowering work, almost impossible to assess because of the extreme behaviour described. The urgent, somewhat relentless narrative draws one in yet repels through its extraordinarily clear-eyed emotional intelligence. Is it an act of love or a plea for forgiveness?... As an account of mental illness this book is bold and ambitious, but it is as a study of one lost woman's struggle to get through the days, the hours, the years that de Vigan's not always sympathetic portrait of her doomed, bizarrely heroic mother will physically, never mind intellectually, leave a reader shaken and affected. How many books can do that? Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Absolutely stunning. This remarkable book is not a memoir, a biography, an analysis or a novel: it is all these and more. It is about the struggle to weave sense out of mutinous threads, how silence breeds crisis, how we are made and unmade. Gauging the extent of the mystery that was her mother, de Vigan strips the psychodrama of family ties - the basis of every human life - to the bone Janice Galloway Delphine de Vigan is a sensation Observer Thrilling, tender ... A genuinely shocking, incandescent read Janice Galloway, Scotland on Sunday Her portrait of the mother, Lucile, . Is compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking ... The luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette . the mixture of reported reminiscence, family legend and empathetic invention is so effective, the Poirier family - parents and children - appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness Ursula Le Guin, Guardian De Vigan never spares her own self-absorption in her repellently irresistible investigation of a life that amounted to symphonic self-destruction yet achieved a bizarre and compelling heroism Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Books of the Year
