Ignorance
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In every war there are stories that do not surface. You can try to forget, but sometimes the past can return: in the scent of a bar of soap, in whispers darting through a village after mass, in the color of an undelivered letter.
Jeanne Nerin and Marie-Angèle Baudry grow up side by side in the Catholic village of Ste. Madeleine, but their worlds could not be more different. Marie-Angèle is the grocer's daughter, inflated with ideas of her own piety and rightful place in society. Jeanne's mother washes clothes for a living. She used to be a Jew until this became too dangerous. Jeanne does not think twice about stealing food when she is hungry, nor about grasping the slender chances life throws at her. Marie-Angèle does not grasp; she aspires to a life of comfort and influence. When war falls out of the sky, the forces that divide the two girls threaten to overwhelm those that bind them together. In this dizzying new order, the truth can be buried under a pyramid of recriminations.
Michèle Roberts's new novel is a mesmerizing exploration of guilt, faith, desire, and judgment, bringing to life a people at war in a way that is at once lyrical and shocking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The parochial prejudices of two provincial towns, Ste.-Marie and Ste.-Madeleine, and by extension France itself, are brilliantly revealed in this uncompromising novel of WWII ignominy and grief from Roberts, whose novel, Daughters of the House, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Marie-Ang le Blanchard and Jeanne N rin both attend the school run by the local rectory, but the similarities end there. Marie-Ang le, a callous, reflexive Catholic with the proper petit-bourgeois background, weds a corrupt notable and black marketeer who extorts Jews during the war, and she eventually achieves wealth and status and gives birth to seven children. Jeanne, a penniless Jew who works as a maid in a bordello frequented by German soldiers, is ostracized and publicly humiliated, as a "disgrace to womanhood," after the war despite her Resistance activities, and forced to abandon her child. Lavish descriptions are the author's trademark. A mere couch will never surface in Roberts's world: "the pink brocade sofas were fat and plush. Cosy armfuls you'd call them if they were girls. They lolled about the room sleepily, brazen and half-bare, their covering tasseled shawls, gypsy bright, slipped to the floor." Mostly, Roberts's polished, ornately wrought prose adds depth and a sense of acute realism to her captivating story which flows seamlessly between the protagonists as they take turns narrating this accomplished and inspired novel of wartime France.
