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Thursday, 12 June 2008 |
Chez Moi
by Agnès Desarthe, translated by Adriana Hunter
Penguin 2008: 257 pp., paperback.
Village Voice €13, Your French News Price €12
Though she is no red-head, Myriam, the narrator of
‘Mangez-Moi’, a novel first published in French in 2006
and now available in translation under the timorous title
‘Chez Moi’, has one thing in common with Andrew Greig’s
heroine Kirsty Fowler: she’s a bundle of contradictions. As
the novel opens, she’s in trouble, with no money, no place
to stay except the hole-in-the-wall restaurant she has just
opened in what is clearly one of the less fashionable areas
of Paris.
Against all odds, she makes a success of her none too
salubrious bistrot de quartier, mainly thanks to her
appealing combination of courage and vulnerability – she’s
emotionally crippled by the memory of a spot of
misbehaving so shameful it takes her 100 pages to get
around to confessing it. Her pluck and funk make her
irresistible to all who come into contact with her, among them a political-science student who
moonlights as a waiter, an amorous florist, and a North African market-gardener who supplies
her with the ingredients of her inventive cooking.
The goodwill surrounding the forty-some year-old Myriam, whose only way of expressing
love was preparing food, ends up bringing her heart out of its coma. At the conclusion of this
charming, chatty, unpretentious work of fiction we understand that she is at last ready to savour
life. A stove has reasons reason doesn't know about, as Pascal didn’t say.
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