The Safe House
The book reconstructs the Boltanski family home and the hidden history contained within its rooms and memories.
Work Information
A family-centered novel about memory, fear, and the hidden life of a Paris apartment.
A family novel about a Paris apartment, its hidden room, and the memories it holds.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Chicago Pr
- Published
- 2017-10-16
- Pages
- 232 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 2.29 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780226449197
- ISBN-10
- 022644919X
- Price
- 4486 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.
Christophe Boltanski is an award-winning journalist who reported for Libération from London, Jerusalem, and the Gulf War. The Safe House is his first novel. Laura Marris is a poet, essayist, and translator. She has been a MacDowell Colony fellow, and her translation of Louis Guilloux's Le Sang noir is forthcoming from the New York Review Books.
Reviews
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The author tells the story of his extraordinary family and ...
The author tells the story of his extraordinary family and the effects the Nazi presence in Paris had on them. Although they all survived, Boltanski captures the horror that is part of the fabric of the their lives in the decades that have followed. The structure of the book and the language are breathtaking.
Related Literary Awards
- Prix Femina Edition 112 (2015) ・Winner