...there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you. [loc. 520]
The setting is a small French town in the Fifties. Elodie, the baker's wife, has 'murdered [her] marriage with familiarity': love has evaporated, as has all excitement, and Elodie's life is an endless round of clothes-washing with the other women at the town's lavoir, of working in the bakery, of petty gossip and a sense that nothing will ever change.
Into this postwar bleakness comes glamorous Violet and her husband 'the ambassador', who claims to have come to conduct 'a government project, a kind of survey'. Elodie is drawn by Violet's allure, and the two become friends -- or at least Elodie believes that they are friends. There are erotic undertones to her interaction with both husband and wife, and erotic thoughts colour her observations of Violet when she's in the company of Elodie's husband, the baker.
And then the townsfolk fall victim to ... something. (We are forewarned: early in the novel, Elodie is writing another never-to-be-sent letter to Violet, and we learn she is living far away by the sea, perhaps in some kind of institution, frequently visited by the police who want her account of events.) The catastrophe is described but not explained, though the author's afterword mentions that 'In the summer of 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning'. And at its heart is Violet and the revelation of her contempt.
This was beautifully written, horribly claustrophobic, and so subtly layered that I suspect I would need to reread if I wanted to fully understand the quartet at its centre, with their shifting loyalties, secrets and motivations. And I would need to read more deeply to understand how the town was slowly collapsing into itself, decaying: perhaps the war, or something that happened during wartime. But I'm not ready to revisit Elodie's bleakness.
Fulfils the ‘a character-driven novel’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
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