Review
"...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 "Never a false note...One of France's most virtuosic novelists." - Publishers Weekly "The jubilation in reading this book is due to the fact that, like in Rabelais, Salvayre resorts to getting laughs, and plays with the musicality of her prose." - Le Matricule des Anges"
Product Description
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.