Forever valley

by Marie Redonnet

These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. Hôtel Splendid recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; Forever Valley is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; Rose Mellie Rose is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Ôat.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . [They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, 20th Century, Novella, Novels, Classics

128 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 30, 1992

About the author

Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature.

Reviews

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1137441...

Some of us take life as it comes and we accept our lot. And there are those of us who never complain and simply continue chopping wood and carrying water. But a poor ward of any sort being engaged with a personal project of one’s own design and desire in such a prohibitive life has to be proactive, and can help some to ease a troubled mind. But then, unfortunately, in the end most things never really work out, they just are.

The names of all the characters in this book seem to have some importance except for the sixteen year-old narrator. To us she remains nameless. In the opening pages she is framed as an illiterate, undeveloped virgin, but by book’s end she has mastered a word or two and learned how to put her newfound talents to use in the valley’s sex trade. She practices enough that she learns to skillfully use these so-called lesser physical attributes she was originally equipped with. But like her name, even her prostitution isn’t important, nor is her relationship with basically anyone she has relations with of any kind. She is not exactly indifferent, she just knows what it is she likes and what she does not like. Everyone seems to like her. But her greatest gift in life is her forceful persistence, backed by her relative intuition for knowing when to quit. And then, of course, some things just merely end, or become dead.

The language, at least in translation, reminds me so much of the voice of Ágota Kristóf in her Notebook trilogy. Simple, direct sentences, yet always concealing this inner feeling of something sinister, or strange happening in the background or behind the scenes. An impending doom certain to take place. A creepy feeling of being violated, or a soiling of something pure and innocent. Narrated by the voice of a young sixteen year-old girl, short on education and life experience, the tale proceeds in typical fits and bounds similar to what any teenager might suffer being raised in a poor community if she too lacked a healthy upbringing and no mature adult direction. Her triumph exists in her always committed persistence in whatever she sets her mind to. Otherwise, hopelessness and dread, would dictate the awful fate of her true existence. Regardless, even on a good day, never does her world become what most would consider living in anyway. But then, there just might be some hope for a person of conviction who finally, and for good, can leave a lactating town.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feels like another world, only slightly different. What it's like to live with very little context for what is happening to you, around you. Musicality and repetition of prose akin to Thomas Bernhard, but with emphasis on brevity in sentence structure. Beckettian persistence in continuance of futile activities, paralysis, inertia, dry humor in the face of it all. A darkly beautiful and hypnotic novel in miniature.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

From derelict hotels to derelict churches, the second book in Redonnet’s triptych involves another nameless narrator’s frolics in squalor. This one takes place in a beyondbackwater, where the clueless sixteen-year-old narrator is talked into a life of profitless prostitution with sinister customs officers. Presiding over a dying priest and his crumbling parish, she goes in search of “the dead” by digging four holes in the garden where some previous town has, suggestibly, been buried. Meanwhile her ersatz mother Massi plots to save the “valley below” from its bad milk crisis by seducing the town back into some semblance of its former self. As in Hôtel Splendid, the style is an aching melancholic treat, where vapours of pleasure rise from the existential mire into pure prosaic bliss.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleak and perfectly ordered, the second part of my aptly gray-soaked commute this morning with Young Lions. This follows Redonnet's earlier Hotel Splendid in its rhythmic continuance against despair, but simultaneously depicting harsher stabs of reality along with brighter-burning guiding images and actions that approach an obscure symbology. At the same time, this is a little closer to the systems-level view of later Redonnet. In its ability to draw on all these angles of her work together, it's one of her finest, maybe my favorite besides the expiring noir of Nevermore. The story concerns a young girl who, having known only a lapsed rectory where she cared for an ailing priest, finds work in the only other inhabited bit of her remote valley-home, a dancehall. At the same time, she embarks on a "personal project" of a hallucinatorily macabre nature. All rendered in a clipped, minimalist prose that leaves plenty of space to seize the imagination, and somehow manages to be extremely sad despite its affectless intonations.

Here's to hoping that Redonnet's most recent two longer novels will see an eventual translation...

[derek allard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some years I discover an author I’ve never read before who is so stunningly good that I consider finding new friends because the ones I have never mentioned said author to me. This is one of those years and Marie Redonnet is the author. I read Hotel Splendid over the summer, was wowed, and Forever Valley is just as good. If you like voice driven novels, if you marvel at stark sentences whose subtext goes waaaay beyond the literal words, if you’ve always wanted to read a novel about an illiterate sixteen year old girl who has is raised by a dubious “father” inside a dying rectory before being sent to across the street to a whorehouse and has a penchant for digging up the dead, well, this is your lucky day. I challenge you to read this book and not be moved. Utterly fantastic.

[Woody · Rating 5 out of 5]

This summer I decided to read my way through Marie Redonnet's stunning triptych of novels, and it's one of the best decisions I've made. Forever Valley, the second novel, truly devastates as it reveals more and more of itself to the reader. Despite the novel's ability to transform and evolve, the reader always feels lucid and oriented. Redonnet uses very, very few descriptions, but somehow, there is an undeniable sense of realism that made me feel transported while reading--an almost metaphysical, voyeuristic experience. A truly stunning novel!

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

this slim volume's a revelation. an understated experimental novel. its perfection has something to do with this pared-down style, where the details are few but exquisite. at first it seems like a quaint country narrative, it then soon reveals itself to be something more--perhaps an allegorical tale. but in the end, while maintaining some of the aspects of allegory, none of FOREVER VALLEY's symbols map completely to ideas or reality as much as they manage to point uncannily back at themselves.

from the interview included in the book:

Interviewer: Reading the triptych, one sometimes catches a glimpse of something like a rigorous structure...
Redonnet: What you call structure or composition is indeed a determining factor. Each book adheres to a rigorous structure, at the same time mathematical, architectural, and musical, which transforms itself from book to book: the elements multiply, the combinatorial system grows richer, space and thus mobility becomes more important, the story grows more complex. This structure is part of the language that I invented for myself in order to write, a language built from a lexical and syntactic emptiness that I had to impose on language. Maybe this very idea of structure takes the place of that lost rhetoric, becoming a means of generating another language, and thus another history.

!

part of a triptych, the other two are: HOTEL SPLENDID and ROSE MELIE ROSE.

some more info
&
a bibliography.

[Lara Lie Hølmebakk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elsket elsket welslet fantastisk

[Gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every five years or so I’ll read another Redonnet book. They’re always special, and while this was possibly my least favorite of the three (Nevermore, Hotel Splendid, this) I’ve read, this was still excellent. Nevermore is the masterpiece, a pitch black dream noir on a larger canvas than the others. This novel on the other hand, like with Hotel Splendid, does a lot with a very limited set: A couple of buildings populated with just a few vaguely outlined characters. Redonnet’s novels are just so weird and angular. So gestural and artificial but bleakly evocative. I always think of Kay Sage’s paintings. I love how much room she leaves for the reader. There’s so much room between the minimal sentences and I just find myself dreaming up the world to fill all that empty space. I hope someday we get more of her work translated.

[Bronwen Griffiths · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read 'Hotel Splendid' after reading a review and because I liked that novel so much, I decided to read 'Forever Valley.' Like Hotel Splendid, this is a strange and somewhat surreal book, told in very matter-of-fact prose, in short sentences. The narrator is a sixteen-year old girl who lives alone with her ailing father. The only other person nearby is an older woman who runs a dance-hall, although it turns out the dance hall is also a brothel. The narrator's first sexual encounter is told almost as if it were a medical examination - which may not be to some reader's tastes. However, despite some of the odd and rather gruesome aspects of this short novel, there is also much humour and the whole reads like a dark fairy tale. I loved it.

[Carlota Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book won't be for everyone, but boy is it for me. I could summarize what happens, but that would give it all away. It's subtle and sad and self-aware. The strangeness in what's left unsaid creates space for what's described to be weighty. I'm also not often asking to know more, since it's fulfilling enough to see through the eyes of (what feels like) a Hans Christian Anderson character. This book uses curt sentences to unnerve. It's language is simple, refusing self-indulgence while remaining horrifying and whimsical.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished it. Massi, Father, the Girl are such an enigma, but it’s really quite simple. You know some times, some times you don’t know. perfect bland-ness to accommodate the unknown. Like listening to the words of lectical and emotionally illiterate someone that’s trying to say so much. (kind of like how I’m writing right now)
marie Redonnet you never disappoint me as a woman.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! So haunting. Wildly fabular setting, temporal/historical disjunction or emptiness is fascinating and feels v unique. Her prose as always is whip smart, from what I can tell Jordan Stump does her translations quite well (& this one shows it partic well). Interview in the back is so so so so awesome

[cori · Rating 5 out of 5]

rly edifying author interview in the back too

[Emily Suit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It’s so immersive and yet you are given very little to go off of at times which is kind of the magic of it all.

[Alex C · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entrancing novel(la): moving, haunting, and curiously detached.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The heroine of this novel lives with a priest in a presbytery in Happy Valley. With the priest's encouragement she decides to start digging in the church grounds to find bodies that both are convinced must lie there. Her only other companion in the world is Massi, the widow of the town mayor who lives above a discotheque in the town. The disco is frequented by the shepherds and border guards who live nearby and Massi enlists the heroine to work there. Things get disturbing and weird from there.

A short novel written in a very clear French, perfect for an intermediate or advanced French speaker.

[Shawna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I had to sink into to read. I had to lose myself in it, and came out slightly different at the end. It's voice is powerful. All that isn't said is as much of the story as what is revealed. Great read, but not in a stand-up-and-shout way, more like a sit-and-stare-into-space-and-absorb way. I was torn between four and five stars. It was fantastic writing, but left me feeling as if it was unfinished at the end.

[Kyle]

One of the most carefully miserable books I have ever read. Stunned by its telling. Throughout the narrative a church is falling apart, stone by stone—and that is what the writing feels like as well. Stone by stone.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another murky, strange piece by Redonnet. I love her style, and there are, as in Hotel Splendid, some powerful images. Looking forward to the conclusion to "The Triptych", Rose Mellie Rose.

[Serdna87 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was great. Parataxis. Build-up through accretion. And so on.