'Cry, Mother Spain' by Lydie Salvayre
This week, French literature meets Spanish history thanks to flamboyant writer Lydie Salvayre! Cry Mother Spain, beautifully translated by Ben Faccini, is published this month by Quercus (MacLehose Press). Set in the summer of 1936, Salvayre’s narrative interlaces the voice of her own mother recounting her experiences of the Spanish civil war with that of the rightwing French writer Georges Bernanos.
"Aged fifteen, as Franco's forces begin their murderous purges and cities across Spain rise up against the old order, Montse has never heard the word fascista before. In any case, the villagers say facha (the ch is a real Spanish ch, by the way, with a real spit). Montse lives in a small village, high in the hills, where few people can read or write and fewer still ever leave. If everything goes according to her mother's plan, Montse will never leave either. She will become a good, humble maid for the local landowners, muchísimas gracias, with every Sunday off to dance the jota in the church square.But Montse's world is changing. Her brother José has just returned from Lérida with a red and black scarf and a new, dangerous vocabulary and his words are beginning to open up new realms to his little sister. She might not understand half of what he says, but how can anyone become a maid in the Burgos family when their head is ringing with shouts of Revolución, Comunidad and Libertad?The war, it seems, has arrived in the nick of time."
About the author
Lydie Salvayre is a former psychiatrist, who grew up near Toulouse after her exiled republican parents fled Franco's regime. As a child she spoke Spanish, only learning French after starting school. She studied medicine and specialised as a psychiatrist in Marseille, before beginning to write at the end of the 70's, with her first works appearing in literary reviews in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille around the beginning of the 1980's. Her novel La Compagnie des spectres (The Company of Ghosts) won the Prix Novembre in 1997 and was named Book of the Year by Lire. Pas Pleurer (Cry, Mother Spain) won the Prix Goncourt in 2014. The novel "was selected by the jury in the fifth round of voting by five votes against four for the novel Meursault Contre-enquête (Meursault, Counter-inquiry) by the Algerian columnist and novelist Kamel Daoud, who revisited Albert Camus’s celebrated work L’Étranger (The Outsider)", according to this article from The Guardian.
Here's a little list of her books that have been translated into English (click on the publisher's name for more information):
La Vie commune (1991) - translated into English by Jane Kuntz as Everyday Life (Dalkey Archive Press 2006)
'The hiring of a new secretary shouldn’t be a big deal—just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: “The new secretary has only been here two days,” she says, “and I’m already talking about evil, a word I shouldn’t even be using—arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons.” Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not—despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter—about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties. But the humor is undercut by a sadness, a sense of defeat that makes this slim novel resonate with the injustice of our increasingly impersonal, corporate world.'
La Médaille (1993) - translated into English by Jane Davey as The Award (Four Walls Eight Windows 1997)
'A disturbing, provocative story of an awards ceremony at a massive automotive factory takes acceptance speeches and presentations, makes them into individual minibiographies, and explores the insanity and chaos that is not isolated to fiction, but is a reflection of human life.'
La Puissance des mouches (1995) - translated into English by Jane Kuntz as The Power of Flies (Dalkey Archive Press 2007)
'The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the questions—and answers them. While ranting on to the court about various topics—his family, the museum where he works as a tour guide, and even the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal—the narrator of The Power of Flies reveals himself to be both calculating and unstable. In this latest novel from acclaimed French writer Lydie Salvayre, it is up to the reader to sort through his philosophical diatribe to discover why this man turned killer.'
La Compagnie des spectres (1997) - translated into English by Christopher Woodall as The Company of Ghosts (Dalkey Archive Press 2006)
'When a process-server 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 distrainees Rose Mélie and her teenage daughter Louisiane is more than he has bargained for. Rose, forever unhinged by the trauma of a childhood spent under Nazi occupation, mistakes him for a collaborationist thug and assails him with her alternately tragic and hilarious memories of Vichy France. Louisiane, for her part, treats the process-server to an exaggerated display of courtesy laced with precocious classical erudition and a stream of late-pubescent revelations. In a narrative that lurches giddily between 1942 and 1997, Lydie Salvayre picks at the sores of recent French history, impertinently exposing continuities of authoritarianism. In Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers—a short piece also included in this book—the author grants the process-server a right of reply, which he uses to chilling effect.'
La Conférence de Cintegabelle (1999) - translated into English by Linda Coverdale as The Lecture (Dalkey Archive Press 2005)
'At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecturing the town’s inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator’s opinion, “conversation is a specialty that is most eminently French,” an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France’s reputation. Not to mention, being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his “superbly lumpish” wife who died two months before giving this lecture. One of the oddest characters in contemporary fiction, the lecturer in this novel can’t help but digress about his sad life in the midst of his speech, giving the reader a view of a man trying to turn one of his greatest faults into a virtue and forcing it on everyone else. By turns ironic, hilarious, pathetic, and mortifying, Salvayre’s The Lecture is an exuberant example of the exciting fiction currently being written in France.'
About the translator
Ben Faccini is a novelist, writer and translator. He was born in England and brought up in rural France and Italy. He worked for many years at the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in Paris. He is the author of several books, notably The Water-Breather (Flamingo, 2002) and The Incomplete Husband (Portobello, 2007). He has written extensively on issues in the developing world, particularly on the subject of street children and innovations in education.
