Description
Book SynopsisIn an anonymous French village a child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.
Trade Review'The Child Who beautifully explores the power and powerlessness of language, but I was struck most of all by its haunting depiction of intergenerational silence, and the way we have to live with those silences.' - Tash Aw, author of Strangers on a Pier; 'Aching, tender and luminous, The Child Who explores the splitting of the self that can occur in response to grief. Finding beauty even in the most painful dynamics, this is a humane and moving story touched by a transcendent lyricism.' - Jessica Traynor, author of The Quick; 'Mystical. A slow hand walking you into a forest. I come to it to think about loss, absence and longing, what can never be ours.' - Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House; 'A poetic exploration of the presence of absence in a family's life, tracking grief in all its melancholy intangibility. Jeanne Benameur writes with uncommon beauty, perceptiveness and subtlety.' - Ronan Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul; 'For those with the sensibility to respond to its poetic voice, Jeanne Benameur's L'enfant qui and the excellent English translation by Bill Johnston have the power to change lives. Existential beyond any philosophical system, the book carefully, lyrically explores the phenomenon of being as it occurs in each of three unnamed family members in an unnamed French village at an unnamed time.' - Lynn Hoggard; '[The Child Who] is driven by reflections on the love between parent and child and between husband and wife. And then there's a first-person narrator who talks to the child directly: "I'd like to say to you that the world is immense and lovely, that there's a path for you too."' - John Self, Guardian Best Recent Translated Fiction; 'Prose that approximates the condition of poetry... Benameur's particular strength lies in her ability to give a distinctive voice to the voiceless.' - Michael Cronin, Irish Times; 'Jeanne Benameur's work is carved out of silences. Her characters use few words, while she chooses her own with a parsimony that increases their impact tenfold. Suffused in mystery, this novel-about what makes a family, how a personality emerges, how one learns to inhabit the world-is fashioned from a poetry as startling as its title.' - Raphaelle Leyris, Le Monde; 'It's a brief story, but a prodigiously compact one-the hallmark of all Jeanne Benameur's books. It's impossible to say enough good things about her, for the loveliest assessments will never adequately convey her talent.' - Mohammed Aissaoui, Le Figaro; 'A work of startling beauty.' - Xavier Houssin, ELLE; 'A marvel.' -Claire Conruyt, Le Figaro Litteraire
