The Girl from the Chartreuse - Softcover

P�ju, Pierre

3.3

603 ratings by Goodreads

9780099468691: The Girl from the Chartreuse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099468697 ISBN 13: 9780099468691

Publisher: Vintage, 2006

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The owner of the bookshop THE VERB TO BE, is a red-haired giant imprisoned in an enormous body and his solitude. One wet afternoon, driving a vanload of new and second-hand books, �tienneVollard knocks down and seriously injures a little girl, �va. In the hospital, he meets �va's mother, Th�r�se, a struggling single parent who lacks maternal instincts and whose dream is to be faraway, alone. Both are haunted by guilt: Th�r�se because of her lateness in collecting her daughter, and Vollard because he did not manage to stop his car on time (even if he knows that he could not have avoided -va: indeed she seemed to throw herself in front of the car). Vollard visits �va regularly while she is in a coma and reads books to her, while Th�r�se spaces her visits out. When �va eventually wakes up, she has become mute and is terribly weakened. A few weeks after �va has been sent to a rehabilitation centre in the Massif de la Chartreuse, Th�r�se gets a job faraway and asks Vollard to visit her daughter on her behalf. Soon, Vollard enjoys their walks in the mountain, where he tells her stories and poems he has memorized and tries to break her out of her mute, impassive shell. However, nothing seems to help "La Petite Chartreuse" - Vollard calls �va that way in reference to the monastic order of the Chartreux - to enjoy life again. She becomes weaker everyday to such a point that Vollard decides to find Th�r�se and to take her back to her daughter before it is too late . . .

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Review:

"'Peju's real subject is literature itself...P�ju treads a fine line between pretension and profundity, layering his text with many others from the Gospels to Becket and Borges, but his own words, weighed against theirs, are rarely found wanting.'" (Independent on Sunday)

From the Publisher:

An outstanding prize winning, best-selling French novel. "An unbearable and magnificent novel - on how the ocean of literature breaks against the silence of childhood", Le Nouvel Observateur

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