Par les routes [Sylvain Prudhomme, 2019]

I haven’t been at all productive on the reading front, despite my to-read list that keeps growing. In the past few months, I have started some books which I couldn’t finish, mostly because I lost interest, so I fell into a reading rut.

Before the holidays, though, my boss-now-friend lent me a book that she’d just finished. A French book. In French. It is well written, it is fluid and the French is quite easy to understand and read through, she told me – which, I must admit, enters well into my criteria for starting a French book. Even though I am increasingly fluent in French, reading and writing are sometimes still challenging for me, and when I want to relax, it’s not reading in French that comes to mind first.

Anyway, Par les routes is a lovely book and it is lovely to read. I found the narrator’s voice easy to find and I was able to enter the story without worrying too much about vocabulary. It is about two friends: the narrator, a writer who moves away from Paris to the countryside to find some focus in his work, and the autostoppeur – a hitchhiker, who lives up to his title so seriously that it is actually the theme of his life.

Throughout the story, the characters come to terms with what is essential to them, as told by the narrator while he lives and dwells on the events that he faces. It is a story about distinct ways of living life, of bringing people together, of friendship and what it means to love.

In the hitchhiker’s trips, it was really curious to read about some funnily named places in France, which made me want to know this neighbouring country a little better.

It made me feel good to read this book, at this moment in life.

Le Siècle d’Emma [Fanny Vaucher & Eric Burnand, 2019]

Even though a large part of my life is now in French, I have not read many books in French. This is for several reasons, which I might reflect upon some other time. A friend gave me this book on my birthday last year and, as it was a graphic novel, I was more motivated to read it.

It tells the story of Emma, a young girl born in the beginning of the 20th century, in Switzerland, and of a few members of her family. According to the generation to which they belong, they take part in historic events or are affected by currents, movements and lifestyles of that specific point in time. For instance, Emma is a young woman when her fiancé gets involved in the general strike and is killed. Emma is interested in social movements, is active and becomes a teacher, but she has no right to vote, and when she has children, she gives her career up in order to stay at home with the children. Her granddaughter, who is born in the 70s, grows up with a right to vote, lives in a squat, and becomes involved in activist movements which advocated for the end of nuclear energy production in Switzerland.

What I appreciated in the book was how it told the story of several key moments and movements which still impact Swiss life as I’ve come to know it in my life here for the past five years, and how this was woven in the characters’ lives.