I first heard about this novel on NPR. The reviewer read the first sentence, and I’ll start with that too: “The baby is dead.”
It’s in medias res storytelling–starting quite close to the end and then circling back, and this classic structure works well for the tale.
I know a lot of my friends who have recently had children won’t be able to read this, but if it helps, you don’t actually see what happens to the child(ren). You only know that something did.
This novel was originally written in French and won the Goncourt, making Slimani the first Moroccan woman to win, though it wasn’t her first award.
Slimani is also a journalist, which perhaps explains her eye for detail and her fluid prose.
In short, the novel explores several modern-world tensions. What happens when a woman doesn’t want to just stay home with her children? How do you choose “the perfect nanny”? If the nanny is too perfect, how do you keep yourself from depending on her too much or from exploiting her generosity? Who should decide what the children eat? The person who buys the food or the person who cooks it? Do you really want someone to feel like family or do you secretly want deference and respect? How do you navigate intimate employees in a world where race and class and power conspire to confound us?
