#NovNov Translated Week: In the Company of Men and Winter Flowers
I’m sneaking in under the wire here with a couple more reviews for the literature in translation week of Novellas in November. These both happen to be translated from the French, and attracted me for their medical themes: the one ponders the Ebola crisis in Africa, and the other presents a soldier who returns from war with disfiguring facial injuries.
In the Company of Men: The Ebola Tales by Véronique Tadjo (2017; 2021)
[Translated from the French by the author and John Cullen; Small Axes Press; 133 pages]
This creative and compassionate work takes on various personae to plot the course of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–16: a doctor, a nurse, a morgue worker, bereaved family members and browbeaten survivors. The suffering is immense, and there are ironic situations that only compound the tragedy: the funeral of a traditional medicine woman became a super-spreader event; those who survive are shunned by their family members. Tadjo flows freely between all the first-person voices, even including non-human narrators such as baobab trees and the fruit bat in which the virus likely originated (then spreading to humans via the consumption of the so-called bush meat). Local legends and songs, along with a few of her own poems, also enter into the text.
Like I said about The Appointment, this would make a really interesting play because it is so voice-driven and each character epitomizes a different facet of a collective experience. Of course, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels with Covid – “you have to keep your distance from other people, stay at home, and wash your hands with disinfectant before entering a public space” – none of which could have been in the author’s mind when this was first composed. Let’s hope we’ll soon be able to join in cries similar to “It’s over! It’s over! … Death has brushed past us, but we have survived! Bye-bye, Ebola!” (Secondhand purchase) 
Winter Flowers by Angélique Villeneuve (2014; 2021)
[Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter; 172 pages]
With Remembrance Day not long past, it’s been the perfect time to read this story of a family reunited at the close of the First World War. Jeanne Caillet makes paper flowers to adorn ladies’ hats – pinpricks of colour to brighten up harsh winters. Since her husband Toussaint left for the war, it’s been her and their daughter Léonie in their little Paris room. Luckily, Jeanne’s best friend Sidonie, an older seamstress, lives just across the hall. When Toussaint returns in October 1918, it isn’t the rapturous homecoming they expected. He’s been in the facial injuries department at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital, and wrote to Jeanne, “I want you not to come.” He wears a white mask over his face, hasn’t regained the power of speech, and isn’t ready for his wife to see his new appearance. Their journey back to each other is at the heart of the novella, the first of Villeneuve’s works to appear in English.
I loved the chapters that zero in on Jeanne’s handiwork and on Toussaint’s injury and recovery (Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art, is currently writing a book on early plastic surgery; I’ve heard it also plays a major role in Louisa Young’s My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You – both nominated for the Wellcome Book Prize), and the two gorgeous “Word is…” litanies – one pictured below – but found the book as a whole somewhat meandering and quiet. If you’re keen on the time period and have enjoyed novels like Birdsong and The Winter Soldier, it would be a safe bet. (Cathy’s reviewed this one, too.) 
With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy for review.
(In a nice connection with a previous week’s buddy read, Villeneuve’s most recent novel is about Helen Keller’s mother and is called La Belle Lumière (“The Beautiful Light”). I hope it will also be made available in English translation.)
Her Father’s Daughter (Peirene)
Originally issued in 2005, Her Father’s Daughter was French author Marie Sizun’s first of seven novels, published when she was 65. It’s an autobiographical reflection on a painful experience from her childhood: in 1945, when she was four and a half, the father she had never met returned from the war and reentered the family, only to leave again two years later. That is the essential storyline of this spare novella, told from the perspective of a four-year-old girl whose name is France but who is usually just referred to as “the child.”
“Of the outside world, the child still knows pretty much nothing.” Her universe is limited to her Paris neighborhood and apartment; her mother, Liliane (Li), is the star around which she orbits. Li gives her daughter free rein, even leaving her alone in the apartment while she goes shopping. When the child learns that her father, a prisoner of war, is soon to return from Germany, she is anxious and resentful. The “secret, intimate world” she has with her mother looks fragile, and she is jealous of anyone who tries to encroach. Meanwhile her father and grandmother both think France has been spoiled and seek to instill a new sense of discipline.
There’s a secret at the heart of the book, something big that the mother and grandmother are covering up. It involves a trip to Normandy, yet whenever the girl tries to speak of the event later on, they deny it and tell her she’s only dreaming. My favorite passages of the book recount her helpless anger as she tries to expose their lies: “Fury from the child, who ploughs on, incredulous. Protests. Persists. In vain.” All she can do in retaliation for this deception and the increasing tension between her parents is pour her mother’s perfumes down the sink.
Sizun’s style is characterized by short, simple phrases. The child is not the narrator, yet the prose imitates the straightforward language that a child might use: “A very strange thing for the child, having a father. A father who’s there. At home. All the time. Morning, noon and night.” The compact chapters chronicle the family’s descent into silence, ignoring each other and walking away – which eventually the father does for good.
Peirene issues books in trios. This one is part of the “Fairy Tale: End of Innocence” series, along with The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst. It’s interesting to think about the book in that context, with the Eden of the mother and daughter being shattered by the entry of the father. “Fathers are found in fairy tales, and they’re always slightly unreal and not very kind,” the child thinks. Unfortunately, I found this novella to be slightly monotonous, with a particularly flat ending. I’ll leave you with a few words from the author about what she was trying to do with the book:
I needed to tell this story. To speak about that wound. … As my writing progressed and the book took shape, I felt this therapy wasn’t only for my personal use but spoke to everyone who, like me, may have been immersed in misunderstandings, in emotional distortions with loved ones, for example being forced to choose between a father and a mother.
It’s not exactly a cheery Father’s Day read, but an intriguing little book all the same.
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy.
My rating: 
Note: I’m traveling until the 24th so won’t be responding to comments right away, but will be sure to catch up soon after I’m back. I always welcome your thoughts!
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 