La vie commune

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

La vie commune ( French ; in German roughly 'everyday life') from 1991 is the second novel by Lydie Salvayre , the 2014 Prix ​​Goncourt winner. Among other things, this story deals with the consequences it can have when someone fails to express their dissatisfaction. Salvayre describes this using the example of two women of different ages who have recently had to share an office. Although only Suzanne, the older one, tells the story, as a reader you begin to sympathize with one side and the other.

content

Office space for two people, one computer

Suzanne works for a Parisian advertising agency and tells her doctor, daughter, domestic help or others about changes in her workplace that are disturbing her. She recently had to share her office with someone much younger who knows how to use a Mac. Since the death of her husband over 30 years ago, Suzanne has had a regular professional life, whose routines she likes, and has no friends. She says she has never worn pants because she respects being a woman. The new one with her petty-bourgeois ideals is completely different and also against the fact that she, Suzanne, smokes in her office. When Suzanne is out of the office for some time after falling off the ladder, her rejection mounts so much on her return that she attacks the new girl. Or maybe she just imagined it? At the end of the book, Suzanne has retired early.

interpretation

Suzanne is characterized as simple-minded because she cannot put the annoyances of everyday life into perspective. She also complains that her daughter yells at her when she has had enough of her mother's whining. Suzanne just can't understand her daughter's behavior. Salvayre ironizes traditional gender stereotypes by portraying Suzanne's dilemma in all its breadth: being dissatisfied, but only being able to bring this to bear to the outside world - the main reason why Suzanne catapults herself into the end, so Warren Motte in one Contribution from 2004. In this novel, the treadmill of gainful employment is examined.

When the narrated events take place, whether at this moment or whether it was a few days ago, is not always clear. According to the tone of the story, someone else is to be convinced. Sometimes there are no punctuation marks, sometimes there are no capital letters at the beginning of a sentence. The eleventh chapter deals with a single statement: NO! (I wish it had the power of a punch). But it is not possible for her to roar, as much as she could. She can express her dissatisfaction in a whisper, and then mostly only to herself, says Motte. It is precisely in this kind of confidentiality that Salvayre places the explosives of everyday violence, writes Marie-Pascale Huglo in 2006.

Salvayre wants to give a voice to those who have been robbed of their own voice and equips them with all the power that literature has at its disposal, as Brigitte Louichon sums it up: In this case, it is Suzanne, her professional stress and personal paranoia can be expressed in a monologue. Salvayre uses a monologic principle in almost all of her works and then it is carried out from beginning to end of a novel. Suzanne in La vie commune is one of the few characters whose voice belongs to a person who is introduced by name. With Salvayre, however, having a name does not guarantee that a narrator is a stable personal identity, says Motte.

reception

La vie commune , Salvayre's second novel, is seen as the beginning of her career as a writer. When Salvayre had published her second book, La vie commune , after La déclaration, it was already known - according to Pierre Maury in his blog "Le journal d'un lecteur" - that she was contributing something "strong and irascible" to French literature. Every 8 years a new edition of La vie commune has been published by another publisher, most recently by Gallimard .

At first you find the book amusing, writes Julia Scheeres in the New York Times , but soon it is sometimes unpleasant, sometimes creepy and full of precise observations, and yet you like the 119 pages a lot. You can feel a hatred that is so passionate that it provokes sexual fantasies in Suzanne. Live in the head of a manic mega-woman while reading; it is delicately gloomy and one gets nervous, said Scheeres. Scheeres observes that the reader sympathizes with the tormented as well as with the tormented.

In a review by MA Orthofer on the Complete Review website , it is said that you can almost feel the pressure building up in Suzanne, where there was hardly any space even before meeting the newcomer. Warren Motte points out that one might suddenly think, if one leaves the fictional universe for a moment while reading, that, for example, the capital letters of the NON! come in the eleventh chapter by Salvayre himself, actually written because Suzanne cannot.

literature

  • Brigitte Louichon: Lydie Salvayre. Parler au nom d'Olympe. in: Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? , sous la direction de Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers. Table of contents Rodopi, Amsterdam 2002, ISBN 90-420-1043-6 , pp. 309-325, in French
  • Warren Motte, Voices in Her Head , in: SubStance vol. 33, no. 2 (2004), pp. 13-29, in French
  • Marie-Pascale Huglo, The Salvayre Method , in: Substance vol. 35, no. 3 (2006), pp. 35-50, in French

expenditure

  • La vie commune , Julliard, Paris 1991; 2nd edition 1999 by Verticales, DL; 3rd edition 2007 by Gallimard , all in Paris.
  • Everyday Life , translated into English by Jane Kuntz, Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign / Illinois 2006

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Julia Scheeres, The Office , The New York Times , December 17, 2006
  2. ^ A b M. A. Orthofer, Everyday Life by Lydie Salvayre , Complete review
  3. ↑ a b c d Warren Motte, Voices in her Head , in: SubStance 33,2 (2004) / Special Section: Contemporary Novelist Lydie Salvayre , pp. 13–29, pp. 18, 15
  4. ↑ in the original “le laminoir du travail”, in: Lydie Salvayre. Prix ​​Goncourt 2014 - Bibliography , Bibliothèque nationale de France , 11 November 2014, in French
  5. ↑ a b Brigitte Louichon, Lydie Salvayre. Parler au nom d'Olympe , in: Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? , sous la direction de Nathalie Morello et Catherine Rodgers, Rodopi, Amsterdam 2002, pp. 309-325
  6. ^ Marie-Pascale Huglo, The Salvayre Method , in: SubStance 35,3 (2006), pp. 35-50, p. 38
  7. ^ Entry on Lydie Salvayre , republique-des-lettres.fr
  8. ^ Pierre Maury: Lydie Salvayre, une œuvre ( French ) Institut Français Madagascar. November 6, 2014. Accessed on September 12, 2015: "[...] quelque chose de fort, de colérique"