The Safe House
A Novel
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story.
When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat.
That house (and its vehicular appendage) is at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan—introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother—a woman of “savage appetites”—and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself.
The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. A French-language film adaptation, La cache, was released in 2025 from director Lionel Baier. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a child, Boltanski lived with his grandparents in what the French call a h tel particulier, a nobleman's mansion divided into apartments. But it was particular in the English-language sense as well: individual, specific, utterly nongeneric. Fittingly, Boltanski tells the story in a most particular way in this novel that, according to the translator's note, "exists in a borderland between truth and fiction." The book moves through the large apartment room by room. This Perec-esque approach lets him jump in time sometimes one of the children sleeping on the floor around his grandparents' bed is his father, sometimes it's him but it's the same room. It allows him to cover events he wasn't alive for, particularly the way his Jewish grandfather survived WWII by hiding in plain sight. The family functioned as a unit led by Boltanski's fierce grandmother, who, undaunted by Nazis and polio, hid her husband, homeschooled Boltanski's father and uncles, and wrote prolifically. Despite (or because of? Boltanski leaves that for the reader to decide) barely leaving the family home, two of her sons became prominent scholars, and the youngest is the artist Christian Boltanski. Boltanski describes his family as afraid "of everything, of nothing, of others, of ourselves," but what comes through in this short, smart, funny book is bravery and toughness, especially that of his grandmother, who in a world of imaginary and real terrors kept the family safe and together.
