Review by Booklist Review
Agathe returns to her village in France to help her sister, Vera, attend to their dead father's estate. But sorting the physical debris requires dealing with emotional baggage. Two pivotal events defined the sisters' childhood: Vera stopped speaking when she was six, which left significant scars on her sister's psyche. "I had the suspicion that Vera had intentionally denied me access to her inner world," Agathe recounts. Bearing the burden of her sister's aphasia, Agathe tried to protect her from their parents' increasing frictions, until the weight of it all became unbearable, and she left for the U.S., which was interpreted by Vera as a betrayal. The spare French countryside and the old house overrun with inconsequential artifacts deliver an atmospheric setting that rattles the sisters' already shaky common ground. Vera's aphasia and their parents' separation could use more explanation, and Dusapin's (Winter in Sokcho, 2021) focus on the sisters makes the narrative a bit claustrophobic. Nevertheless, this is a soulful look, heavy with regret, at the ties we cannot break no matter how hard we try.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the quietly affecting latest from Dusapin (Winter in Sokcho), two sisters reunite to clear out their family home in the French countryside. Narrator Agathe, the elder at 30, is a successful scriptwriter living with her partner, Irvin, in New York City. Vera, three years younger, remained in France, where she mysteriously stopped speaking when she was six and communicates by writing. Their father has died and the house will be demolished in nine days. As they empty the house, memories surface: of their mother leaving when Agathe was nine, of life with their father, who worked long hours, and of Agathe's responsibility for her younger sister ("We were bound together by our shared language of silence and cries"). Dusapin wonderfully evokes the complexity of the sisters' relationship via flashbacks, such as Agathe's defending of Vera from bullies and Agathe's humiliation when she was invited to a party and left stranded on the steps of a cathedral. Other local landmarks such as caves and a cheese factory form an evocative picture of the rural setting and its hold on the characters. It's a beautiful rendering of unresolved adolescence. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A writer returns to rural France and, with her silent sister, must empty the family home before it's knocked down. Agathe is a screenwriter living in New York. Her most recent film won a prize at an Italian film festival, and that success landed her a job adapting a George Perec novel,W, or The Memory of Childhood. Agathe was just 15 when she moved to the U.S. permanently; now 30, she's called to France by her sister, Véra, who asks for help clearing out their family estate, finally being sold--to a company that plans to destroy it--after their father's death five years ago. Settled into the crumbling building for nine days with Véra, who has been aphasic since childhood, Agathe is unsettled by everything around her, from the ants in the house, to the absence of people in the village. Hunters roam the forest surrounding the estate, being dangerously inattentive to the sisters' presence. Agathe is haunted by the complicated life she left behind in New York--a partner and their attempts to start a family--as well as by the past that surrounds her in France. As the sisters sort through a lifetime of their family's belongings, Agathe feels oppressed by the weight of her memories and the question of whether she's left Véra without the protector and companion Agathe once was for her younger sister. Dusapin is a writer gifted in atmosphere; every image in this slim novel oozes with portent and symbolic weight, from the caves in which the sisters played as children to the novel that Agathe adapts. The translation from French by Higgins reflects the prose's broody lyricism. A delicate and elegant novel that asks what we owe the ones we love. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
