The Girl from the Chartreuse By Pierre Péju
Stories to wake the dead
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The latter, an aimless, depressive drifter, elicits little sympathy. Éva herself, even after a partial recovery, remains a cypher - silent, frail, unemotional. Vollard is the focus of our compassion, particularly after the novel's central, and least successful, section reveals the torments and privations of his youth.
Péju's real subject is literature itself. Vollard is an unlikely Scheherazade but, in telling Eva fairytales to wake her from her coma, he finds a use for the quotations that swarm at him through nights of insomnia. Péju 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.
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