In this category, we can do no finer than the work of Nobel Prize winning author Annie Ernaux, in her exquisite elegy to her father, ‘A Man’s Place.

What happens when a child outgrows a parent?

In her inimitable style, Annie Ernaux takes on this excoriatingly personal – even humiliating question – with an unsparing interrogation of the life of her father, and how his hopes, dreams and ambitions in some ways outstripped the capacity of his life.

Annie Ernaux’s father was unequivocally one who had outgrown the limitations of his own inheritance as well – the son of a farm labourer, and one prone to fits of violence at the prospect of anyone in his household reading, he himself had gleaned an education sufficient to be able to become a shop-keeper with a small cafe. This did not guarantee the securities of wealth, but still improved upon the physical labour and poverty that would have been his lot. Nonetheless, the urge towards a better life was also informed by a deep anxiety about performing the class manners to which he was a newcomer, with a pervasive shame about his own roots. Here Annie becomes the object of his affection and a receptacle of his ambitions – but when she achieves his dream, of finally becoming a member of that elusive upper echelon, she grows outside his capacity to understand; and perhaps, even love.

Ernaux approaches this fully admitting that this book will be a betrayal – to write about it at all is to admit out loud the unspoken chasm between them, that her own abandonment of her class has made all too wide. She undertakes this activity without attempting to gain sympathy for any party, but nonetheless does not balk from the underlying rage that provides the impetus to the narrative itself. With this, she gives us a rare bravery in confronting the limitations of love when it is met by the depredations of class. The shocking detail of ordinary poverty taken for granted across the eras is also vividly on display, speaking to her now iconic reputation as the chronicler of her generation.

“A book is a fight against time.”

Shooting to fame for her works ‘The Years’ and ‘Simple Passion’, A Man’s Place is written in conversation with ‘A Woman’s Story’, which is a similarly rendered depiction of her mother. Ernaux says that writing for her demands the removal of herself from the narrative in order to have its larger fidelity towards the recording of truth as it is – an endeavour which has been successfully accomplished if the Nobel Prize has anything to say about it. She won the Nobel in Literature in 2022, with judges lauding this enterprise saying, “And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.”

Reviews of A Man’s Place echo the sentiment – The Telegraph says, “A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity.” This work also showcases in particular her bravery in being seen even through aspects of herself that would be ignoble – “In being willing to show her discomfort,” writes The New Statesman, “her disdain and her honest, careful consideration of the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, Ernaux has struck upon a bold new way to write memoir.’

We will be discussing this book at our latest Book Club in Alliance Française de Delhi this April, on the 10th at 5.30 pm! Reach out to us at the frenchbookoffice@institutfrancaisindia.in for more details and to join in. For those who need an extra reason to join up, those who sign up can avail of a 10% offer on this title at Kunzum Bookstores in Delhi to get your latest read!

What Have We Been Up To?

We are delighted to announce that PMF has made its first forays into the international, with our latest PMF bookshelf opening in Bhutan, with a new shelf at Junction Bookstore at Thimphu. We were also delighted to release our latest batch of exciting merchandise at the Francophonie Mela this month with Kunzum, where readers made a beeline for PMF bookmarks and tote bags! (You can also get them at the nearest PMF bookstore near you – here’s the list.)

We can’t wait to write to you with more of updates next month! Until then, if you’ve been reading all the way to the end, drop us a line telling us what you love, what you hate, and what you want to see more of!

À bientôt!

The PMF team

This month, we’re reading a slender novel that was nominated for the International Booker Prize – Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat.

How guilty are we of the deaths of thousands that happen every day, that we do nothing about?

The vast majority of us would say that we are not — but this was not the case for one French woman sitting at a coastal rescue co-ordination centre on the coast of Cap Gris-Nez. Well past midnight, a small Boat filled with migrants seeking to cross the Channel into England called her in distress, saying that their boat had sprung a leak. It would be her job to co-ordinate the rescue efforts between the French and English coast guard, to ensure that their lives would be saved.

Instead, 27 lives were lost one November night in 2021. The operator would be prosecuted, held accountable for a single sentence that she said that betrayed what was felt to be an astonishing lack of humanity – “You will not be saved.”

This is where Vincent Delecroix begins his novel Small Boat, inspired by the real-life events that took place that tragic night. The rescue operator has come to the police station, where she is interrogated by a police officer who looks just like her, and she must listen to the words she spoke that evening that had been recorded, played back to her, and defend herself and justify her actions.

Astonishingly, she refuses to take the blame, or to be culpable and guilty for the loss of these lives, defending herself with a larger question – was she, the person at the very end of this dreadful journey, to be blamed for the loss of these lives, or was it the world at large who had created the conditions that caused these migrants to set out into the dark night, at risk of life and limb for the hope of a better life?

As we follow her arguments, we find her to be unexpectedly sympathetic – a single mother of a small girl, whose xenophobic husband has abandoned her because he hates that she ‘rescues migrants’ nightly. She stoutly defends against allegations of racism not by showcasing a performance of empathy, but by insisting that as a rescuer, she cannot have a special sense of empathy for anyone because she must treat every call she receives the same, making no discriminations between a rich drunk whose yacht has been set adrift, and a boat full of desperate asylum-seekers fleeing war.

As we find ourselves unwillingly drawn to her point of view, it is also pierced by a singular fact : there was a boat that could have rescued them. They had seen the boat in danger, and asked her what to do. Instead of giving them the go ahead, she had informed them that another rescue boat was on the way, but it was not. The English Coast Guard as well had been co-ordinating with her, informing her that they were unable to reach in time.

Was it a mistake? Was it deliberate?

Towards the end, when the desperate migrants had called her to say that they were in the water, she had replied, “Yes, but you are in English waters.” When they begged for help, she said, “I did not ask you to leave.” When the final moments came, she said, “Help is not coming.”

Delecroix shows us how even more than the possibility of an accident of negligence, was the horror of this last failure of empathy – to be able to give the dying no succour at all, not even that of false hope.

What led Delecroix to explore this?

“The young woman in charge shows no compassion at all, makes appalling jokes, lies and finally expresses simple irritation, answering roughly and sarcastically to the desperate calls of the shipwrecked,” he says in an interview. “This was the real starting point of my novel, a fiction that tries to imagine how someone with no evil in her, who is just anybody, can act and talk in such an inhuman manner and become a striking example of the so-called ‘banality of evil’, as Hannah Arendt put it.”

The singular perspective of this title is the perspective. Instead of putting the emphasis on the voices that are dying, and showing them as objects of our empathy, Delecroix takes the radical position of instead trying to interrogate those on the other side – the people who have the power to help or abandon, and in so doing, turns his gaze upon us all.

“What does it mean to be a spectator of the wreckage, as we all are?” He asks. “What does it mean to stand at this point, on the shore? How can anyone slip from a common and ordinary behaviour to a calm inhuman position?”

Delecroix is a philosopher and expert on Kierkegaard – whose work also often takes the opposing position as a way of illuminating the moral and ethical framework that they have failed to fulfill. In this novel, he explores a philosophical case for the individual’s responsibility, even when diffused into a larger social condition in which a performance of empathy is often the very least that is asked of us socially.

Delecroix was featured in Dua Lipa’s podcast, where she says, “This book challenged me profoundly. It moved me, and stayed with me. It’s not an easy read – but as our politics descend into hate-mongering and point-scoring, it’s an essential story that needs to be told.”

International Booker Prize Judges said, “This book doesn’t just set up a complex fictional situation to illuminate the greatest human crisis of our time, it puts us inside it. It shows us how it is already inside us, in our language, our feelings, our relationships to news, politics and each other.  

The first of his novels to be translated into English, Small Boat was nominated for the International Booker Prize, and is now read across the globe.

You can find it at a PMF! bookstore near you - check out the list of participating bookstores here.

This Month’s Events

This March, we celebrated our very first book club, where we were reading none other than this very book! We met new friends who love to read and talk about books, and talked about the various perspectives that we can find in this novel – and hope to meet again next month. Tell us if you’d like to join us!

See you next month,

Monsieur Reynard

The Pardon My French Fox

What the reader wants, the reader gets – and so this year, we’re bringing you the best of contemporary French authors, through a carefully curated selection of titles that are available at all bookstores. We’ll also be putting them in your inboxes - for those who want to know who their next read is, we’ll be spotlighting an author every month, for a deep dive into their life and work for readers to know more. Stay on to the end of this newsletter to find out more about events that will be coming up at cities near you.

Spotlight | Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger

Does writing save us?

Neige Sinno thinks not, but then – she isn’t looking to be saved.

Historically speaking, it has often been the case that stories on survivorship are forced into a box where trauma is the only thing that defines both the narrator and the narrative itself.

Sinno rejects this framework and offers us a radical and necessary new perspective – one in which a survivor’s gaze examines the world, and exposes the darkness within the social fabric that permits pedophilic and incestuous abuse to take place, at large, and to do so with the substantial skills at her services as an accomplished author.

This book is not the first time that Sinno has spoken out about this experience. At the age of 19, a year after leaving home, she confesses this to her mother, who believes her – who confirms that it took place, with the man, and then finds herself unable to leave him nonetheless. Sinno, in an act of astonishing bravery, decides to go to the authorities about this to protect her other siblings, who are still living in his house. It is a matter of pure luck that Sinno’s story does not end there, with ‘not enough evidence’ – when arrested, Sinno’s stepfather does not deny what he has done, and confesses.

In her words

“I don’t want them to read this book thinking that they’re just hearing someone tell their life story. I don’t tell everything. I tell the things I need to tell. I write the words I need to use because I want to produce a certain effect,” she says. The book explores her life with the same deftness with which she explores literature, analysing of course Nabokov’s Lolita, but also Toni Morrison, Julián Herbert, Virginia Woolf, Mary Gaitskill, and effortlessly drawing on thinkers like Giles Deleuze and Antonin Artaud to sieve the nature of humanity through its handling of trauma.

Sinno’s journey within this book then does not find itself needing to justify her reality, as so often is the case, but instead allows her to explore the malleable nature of reality itself.

In an interview to the Yale Review, she says, “Every child who is a victim of abuse is conditioned to believe that it didn’t really happen, or at least to doubt the reality of the abuse. Some even have traumatic amnesia and bury the memory completely. It happens in a surreal moment. You’re always alone with him. No one sees it. It doesn’t exist on the same level as the rest of reality.” This sense that reality is something created in consensus is one she explores further within the relationship between the surivor and society. Following the case, Sinno was ostracised from her community.

“You have looked evil in the eye,” Sinno writes, “and now no one can look at you.” Sinno’s stepfather, however, was sent to a rehabilitative prison for 5 years, following which he has built a new life again, with new children in a chillingly similar format as before.

Sinno brings an almost surgical precision to her description of the events that take place, while the narrative as a whole leaps through an emotional landscape without adhering to a linear chronology. She allows the reader to experience the fullness of her interiority as a result, without a clear beginning or end, and refusing to give the reader, and by extension society, the relief of eventually being saved.

“It has consequences in every aspect of our being, the deepest parts of ourselves,” she says in an interview to the Guardian, noting that after the trial and so on is done, life nonetheless continues, and any story that ends with victory of resilience is insufficient to encompass what follows from there.

At the start of her book, she asks the question that perhaps is at the heart of what we all want to know – why does he do it? How can people do these profoundly evil things? By the end, she has taken us on a journey where her answer is more simple than comfortable – evil, she says, does not exist exclusively in the province of monsters, but of all of us. The people who do it, simply do it because they can.

In a moving passage, she describes a moment in which she, watching her own child, imagines what it would be like to desecrate the child’s trust with a violation, and knows in that moment that the difference between her and a monster is simply the moment of choice, in choosing to do it. She describes the devastating ‘other world’ created uniquely between the abuser and the victim, where other sufferers might recognise each other as travellers, but one where those outside abuse cannot venture, but there is always the choice to not fall.

“It’s a world where it’s impossible to be ignorant of evil. It’s everywhere, altering the color and flavor of everything. Ignoring or forgetting it is not an option, for the more you run from it, the quicker it catches you up. But it is possible to stand back from the brink. That is the challenge: how to remain on the threshold of this world, how to keep going like tightrope walkers along the wire, facing the future.”

Sad Tiger was a huge success in France, selling over 300,000 copies, and is now translated into over 20 languages, including English. It has won the European Strega Prize, 2024, was shortlisted for France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, and has won over a dozen other awards. Closer home, it also won the 3rd edition of the Choix Goncourt of India in 2023.

You can grab her book at a PMF! Bookstore near you – check out our list of participating bookstores here.

A literary start to the year

This year, we were pleased to present some of France’s finest contemporary authors to Indian audiences at literature festivals across the country. Marie Darrieussecq and Negie Sinno took Delhi by storm at the Alliance Francaise Auditorium, where they discussed how literature engages with impossibly difficult realities. Neige Sinno went on to speak to audiences at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Hindu Lit Live Festival in Chennai, the Apeejay Kolkata Lit Fest as well as the New Delhi World Book Fair. Read more about it here.

You can watch Neige’s amazing conversation with the inimitable Priya Ramani at The Hindu Lit for Life 2026 here.

Things to Look Forward To At PMF!

This March, we’ll also be launching our very first Book Club! Starting off in New Delhi, we’re bringing people together to celebrate books, discussions around books, and hopefully, new friendships for book lovers. If you’re interested in signing up, you can write to frenchbookoffice@institutfrancaisindia.in – let us know if you want to be part of this!

Until next month,

Monsieur Reynard

Pardon My French