Pascale Kramer - Böcker

How, this novel asks, can you imagine the worst when you are young and life is sunny? The answer lies in the telling of The Living, in which a young mother, with her teenage brother, takes her two small children to a deserted quarry on a hot summer afternoon. Seen through the eyes of the brother, Benoît, the drama plays out with all the power and seeming inevitability of classical tragedy, made all the more intense by the blistering heat of the day. On that blazing hot summer day Benoît, to entertain his nephews, seats them in a gondola and sends them down a cableway to the pylon on the other side of the river. The harrowing story of what follows is narrated in Pascale Kramer's artfully simple yet transparent prose, evoking the deep reservoirs of feeling that family members cannot voice, perhaps even to themselves. The Living is filled with the vitality of summer. At the same time, it reveals suffering at its most pure and most volatile as the affected people wonder, in the wake of tragedy, whether they should subsist with the living or with the dead.

"Intense and bravely uncompromising. An adult study of pain, thwarted affection, and guarded privacies in a world at the edge of violent public breakdown. An impressive achievement." --DAVID MALOUF, author of Ransom: A Novel and The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World Simone and Claude live in a house with a lush garden, surrounded by a hedge that barely protects them from the growing violence and unrest in their low-income neighborhood. Simone mourns the loss of youth and possibility as Claude, a gym teacher who has been diagnosed with cancer, edges toward death. This is an unflinching portrait of a couple ravaged by illness and locked into mutual isolation--that is, until the arrival of a young boy brings hope and upsets their delicate danse macabre to devastating effect. Pascale Kramer dissects romantic love's psychic carnage while unsentimentally revealing the unique beauty born of an adult's love for a child. As does Marguerite Duras, she wields spare language like a club and plumbs emotional depths rarely reached outside of poetry. A brilliant collision of hope and despair, The Child is a tour de force.Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, is the author of fourteen books, including three novels published in English: The Living, The Child, and Autopsy of a Father. Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about children's rights.

"[Kramer's body of work is] precise and sumptuous . . . a song of emotion, but with a great lucidity about the humanity of simple people."—Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Swiss Grand Prize for Literature citation"You need to read Pascale Kramer's books because they take you on a journey. You board a small ship that enters the human body, and what you felt while reading follows you for days after you've closed the book."—Elle (France)"Restrained, chiseled, implacable, the novels of Pascale Kramer perfectly master the art of creating a diffuse discomfort. Poignant."—Marie Claire (Switzerland)When a young woman returns to her childhood home after her estranged father's death, she begins to piece together the final years of his life. What changed him from a prominent left-wing journalist to a bitter racist who defended the murder of a defenseless African immigrant? Kramer exposes a country gripped by intolerance and violence to unearth the source of a family's fall from grace.Set in Paris and its suburbs, and inspired by the real-life scandal of a French author and intellectual, Autopsy of a Father blends sharp observations about familial dynamics with resonant political and philosophical questions, taking a scalpel to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment spreading just beneath the skin of modern society.Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, is the author of fourteen books, including three novels published in English: The Living, The Child, and Autopsy of a Father, which was named a finalist for the La Closerie des Lilas, Ouest-France, and Orange du Livre prizes. Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about children's rights.