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Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:The award-winning novel of a young American girl in Franceâ??hailed as "an impressive debut" that is "written with quiet, lyric forcefulness" (Elle).
A New York Times Notable Book
Young, inexperienced, and fleeing a terrible personal loss, Rosieâ??the new au pair to the Tivot family estate in Franceâ??finds herself ill at ease when trying to connect with Nicole, the cool, distant, and beautifully polished mother of the three children she cares for. There is something about the woman that both fascinates and unnerves Rosie.
The same is true of the rest of the Tivot clan. Nicole's dissatisfied husband, Marc, and their children all seem to be caught in an unending struggle against each other for love and acceptance. Only when Rosie is sent to care for Nicole's now-elderly guardianâ??the storyteller of the family's secretsâ??does she finally discover the truth. There, Rosie will learn of a past darkened by war, duplicity, and a tragedy that still resonates in the Tivot's lives . . .
De ingrediënten waren veel belovend: een au-pair die bij een Frans gezin in huis (ic woonboot) komt. Het gezin bestaat uit 3 kinderen, een vader (waar ze amoreuze gevoelens voor krijgt) en een moeder (waar ze een moeizame relatie mee heeft). In het begin zit er nog wel wat vaart in het verhaal, maar naar het einde toe wordt het saaier en saaier. Een tegenvaller! ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For all of my families
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Plaire is not a wealthy town.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
But I can't feel anything—not her withered hand or the earth she loves or the suns that are still blazing above us—and I know if there's one thing I ache to abandon it is my body.
In the New Hampshire house with the red door—and the gold slot into which these cards are dropped—live my sister, her husband, and the baby I gave them. All I can hope is when that child has words he will tell them the things I cannot. Perhaps my whole life here in France will spill out of his mouth.
The barrier of language closed down around me like bars.
Clouds we thought would burn off by noon have only bloated, squatting on their heavy haunches above us.
The shape of a German—the sharp epaulets, the tightly cinched waist, the bulbous thighs, the narrow booted calves—was a shape recognizable at any distance.
"What about me?" I felt drunk and miserable. Remembering the bathtub made me remember the hollowness of washing my belly and the yellow crust, despite the pills, that I had to scrub from my nipples. "I got pregnant in twelfth grade, and since I lived with my sister and she really wanted a kid, I gave it to her. I was supposed to go to college, but I came here instead." I regretted it immediately. Leslie would tell Francine, who would tell Lola, who would tell Marc, who would have to tell Nicole. Who would fire me. But I was angry. I wanted to punish them, make them feel guilty for their perfectly planned lives. And it felt good to tell the truth instead of the phony excuses about my passion for the French language and culture that I had been giving everyone since I arrived. I felt the laughter I'd been craving rise inside me. "Oh, God, Rosie," Leslie said, seeing the change in my expression. "I almost believed you."
"Paris. The Pont Neuf. Have you ever been there?" "No. I took French, but I never thought of it as a real place."
She tried to think of some way to tell him that if he didn't relax a bit he'd ruin this day that he'd been looking forward to for so long. She remembered the times she'd done that, ruined events with seriousness and expectations, but she also remembered that even after she'd learned this, after she'd warned herself, it still happened all over again. She knew warning Guillaume would be useless. It was something you had to learn slowly, going forward and backward and forward again.
She was intelligent—too intelligent, she had heard Papa once lament, as if intelligence were a great weight in one's head that might topple the whole body.
There was an eruption of laughter on the other side of the table. J-P had reached the punch line of one of his stories. The girls laughed the longest, tinkling on like shattered glass.
"I have noticed only that he works at the same snail's pace he inherited from his father."
I watched his hands as they rose and fell. He had wide palms and long lean fingers. He stopped talking and looked around the room. "What people do to each other," he said quietly. He remained very still. "You can feel them here, can't you? You can almost hear their voices." I could feel how it would be if he placed those hands on me, if he bent his long neck down. The yearning and the comfort of the dream and his touch came back to me. If I heard any voices at all, it was the voice of the fallen women. I wondered if, once fallen, you kept on falling, again and again, for the rest of your life.
The cathedral rose up before us like all cathedrals, gaudy and spired, as if dribbled from a finger like sand. And like all good tourists, we stood before it in its large plaza, absorbing its glistening magnificence against the plush cloudless sky.
My Spanish came out nearly as well as the French. I loved the whole different feel of it on my tongue.
I like it that for rooms at a time people might have thought, as Marc spoke quietly into my ear and Lola tugged at my sleeve, that this was my family.
It felt as if I were suddenly trapped beneath their bed, forced to listen to a conversation I could neither fully understand nor gracefully escape.
She had slipped her hands inside us and watched us dance for the simple satisfaction of what seemed to be her deepest belief: that people will always disappoint you.
"Bonjour," she said to us, with a confidence that announced, unmistakably, Here I am!
I wondered what would happened now with the hour and a half left to us. Nicole wasn't there to orchestrate us, and it seemed we might drown ourselves in our freedom to choose.
"I think the most painful thing about not believing in God is that there is no one to thank when you need to," he said.
"I just wanted to do what you want to do," he said, lifting his hands defensively, and I could see in this gesture the years he'd suffered with a woman who did not love him, who rarely touched him, who was incapable of anything more than an occasional good mood, a woman who could receive even less easily than she could give.
I held him tighter, then tighter still, but he wasn't close enough. I could not wrap my arms around the afternoon.
I was at both ends of the moment, full of the anticipation of its beginning and the awful loss of its passing.
It is a subtle violence, the violence of absence.
Marc seemed half-hewn, as if his torso had been set down temporarily and precariously atop his long legs, as if the sculptor meant to get back to the project later.
Her hair was whipped into a lopsided funnel she didn't try to control.
Nicole raised her arms high above her head. It was impossible not to think of pushing her. A few more knots and the wind would have knocked her over. At exactly the same time, Marc an I took a step closer, then, sensing movement, shot each other the same look, not our regular looks of affection or guilt, apology or promise, but of warning. In that split second, I saw we each half believed the other capable of a quick shove at the small of Nicole's back.
I watched the guilt spread across his face like oil
Losing Lola was like losing gravity. I didn't realize how much I'd depended on the weight of her love until it was gone.
I wanted to make her truly want what she already had, for she had so much and I hated her for not knowing it.
It was like reading a book and losing consciousness of the barriers of pages and words—being shoved right to the edge of the scene.
"Did you ever tell anyone?" I asked softly, coaxingly, before the topic was scared off like a skittish animal.
There might have been lots of aunts and uncles and cousins and, on top of that, people you called your aunts and uncles and cousins. There would have been people always watching over you, guiding you, loving you. You would have been part of something large and alive and important. You wouldn't have had just one sister, and when you lost her you wouldn't feel like you'd lost everything in the world.
This was the second time I'd ever heard her speak of the past, and even now she spoke reluctantly, as if something was pushing her on. This wasn't calculated, I realized, and it had everything to do with Spain. And something else had happened there, something perverse and unsought and terrible: Nicole had come to trust me.
When, at the moment I'd proven myself utterly untrustworthy, were people now clamoring to confide in me?
It was like writing in the sand, my life, each segment necessarily washed away.
Traffic would begin on the river and the water would be stirred, carrying, then shattering, the reflections of gray-roofed buildings and wide-arched bridges, one after the other.
Dawn, when it finally came, glistened on the red leather of the empty seats. Outside there were blue-green fields, with tiny pearls of mist popping and vanishing above them, and the woolly, slumbering shapes of hills beyond.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
"Two sets of twins. And all four of them fell in love with my mother's cousin, Laure," Nicole begins, and she speaks until the rain eases, the clouds travel east, and the hour, when we step out onto the terrace, has turned a dark gleaming mauve.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:The award-winning novel of a young American girl in Franceâ??hailed as "an impressive debut" that is "written with quiet, lyric forcefulness" (Elle).
A New York Times Notable Book
Young, inexperienced, and fleeing a terrible personal loss, Rosieâ??the new au pair to the Tivot family estate in Franceâ??finds herself ill at ease when trying to connect with Nicole, the cool, distant, and beautifully polished mother of the three children she cares for. There is something about the woman that both fascinates and unnerves Rosie.
The same is true of the rest of the Tivot clan. Nicole's dissatisfied husband, Marc, and their children all seem to be caught in an unending struggle against each other for love and acceptance. Only when Rosie is sent to care for Nicole's now-elderly guardianâ??the storyteller of the family's secretsâ??does she finally discover the truth. There, Rosie will learn of a past darkened by war, duplicity, and a tragedy that still resonates in the Tivot's lives . . .