Your Father's Room, Michel Déon
The Book Office is delighted to be presenting Your Father's Room, by Michel Déon, as book of the week!
Later, although he wondered about the scene so precisely etched in his memory, he refused to see a psychiatrist specialising in infantile recall. He merely accepted it as a flash of clarity that for some unknown reason had embedded itself in his baby memory, imprinting an indelible colour image there, an image that, incidentally, was completely unimportant and one he would have loved to replace with another - of his mother and father bending over his cradle, for example, or kissing each other.
The tone is set for this short novel, which oscillates between fiction and memoir - for despite fictionalised characters, Michel Déon's (or should we say Edouard's) memories come very much alive in the book. The first pages of the novel will take you back to his 1920s childhood spent in Paris and Monte Carlo. Within a bourgeois yet unconventional upbringing, ‘Teddy’, an observant and sensitive boy, must deal with not just the universal trials of growing up, but also the sudden tragedy that strikes at the heart of his family.
Michel Déon's prose comes in a delicate translation by Julian Evans, and we strongly encourage you to hear the writer and the translator who met in Michel Déon's Irish house and whose discussion is available on the following video. "Memory is a strange thing", remarks Michel Déon as he reflects on his attitude towards remembering, as a child. His life in Montecarlo, his father's profession and his mother's lover - all are put into words in Your Father's Room, owing a lot to his observation as a child: "The first years are capital moments of a child, and mostly when he discovers the reality of things".
This child's perspective on life is what you can read through his lines. And when Julian Evans asks him what he thinks of his own book, Michel Déon's advice is affirmative:
"May I say something enormous? ... I think it's very good!" - and we couldn't agree more!
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