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WORK TITLE: The Safe House
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/10/1962
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: French
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 10, 1962; son of Luc Boltanski.
EDUCATION:Attended the Centre de Formation des Journalistes (France).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Le Progrès Egyptien, Egypt, journalist, Jerusalem correspondent, 1995-2000, London correspondent, 2000-04; Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, France, journalist.
AWARDS:Prix Bayeux-Calvados, 2000; Prix Femina, 2015, for La cache.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the Rue 89 website.
SIDELIGHTS
Christophe Boltanski is a French journalist. He attended the Centre de Formation des Journalistes and moved to Egypt soon after to become a reporter for the publication, Les Progrès Egyptien. Boltanski served as the Jerusalem correspondent for that publication from 1995 to 2000 and as the London correspondent from 2000 to 2004. Then, he joined Le Novel Observateur, a French periodical. Boltanski has written nonfiction books, including Les sept vies de Yasser Arafat (cowritten with Jihan El-Tahri), Chirac d’Arabie: Les mirages d’une politique française (cowritten with Eric Aeschimann), and Minerais de sang: Les esclaves du monde moderne.
In 2015, Boltanski released La cache: Roman, a so-called true novel about his family history. It won the Prix Femina the year it was published. An English version of the book, The Safe House: A Novel, was released in 2017. It was translated by Laura Marris. In the book, Boltanski recalls living with his grandparents in an apartment in a building called a hotel particulier, which was once the home of a very wealthy family. During WWII, Boltanski’s grandmother, whom he calls Mère-Grand, put his grandfather, who was Jewish, into hiding in the house’s crawlspace and kept their children, including Boltanski’s father, out of school. A prolific writer who suffered from Polio, Mère-Grand two scholars and a successful artist. Boltanski considers how his family members’ isolation in the hotel particulier affected each of their lives, including his own.
Jocelyn Hannah, contributor to the New Yorker, described the volume as “grim and, at times, almost surreal.” “Complex and meticulously plotted, this mystery house full of odd characters will make the reader consider storytelling as the building of a physical and mental space,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews writer. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented: “What comes through in this short, smart, funny book is bravery and toughness, especially that of his grandmother.” Bob Duffy, critic on the Washington Independent Review of Books website, suggested: “The Safe House gives voice—and vividly so—to the echoes of shared memories, artfully reconstituting them before they fade. Part memoir/part novel, the book evokes the uniquely circumscribed, almost tribal, coexistence of three generations of a family clustered in a sprawling mansion on the upscale Rue de Grenelle in twentieth-century Paris.” Duffy added: “Boltanski brilliantly achieves a felt sense of his own dual role as observer of and participant in his family saga.” Writing on the Foreword Reviews website, Kristine Morris asserted: “Elegant, highly visual, alternatingly airless and soaring on the wind of inspiration, Boltanski’s intimate tale, gracefully translated by Laura Marris, walks a tightwire between darkness and light, melancholy and joy.” In a review of the French version of the book on the H-France website, Philip Nord commented: “Boltanski’s prose is rich in savory and well-chosen words. The writing is artful, and so too is the book’s construction.” Nord added: “La Cache represents a going back, a return indoors, but a return in the company of readers who are introduced into a family circle that is bound tight: bound from without by the pressures of an often hostile world and bound from within by an intensity of emotion, centered on the indomitable and regal figure of the author’s Mère-Grand.” Nord concluded: “La Cache is a compelling book, deeply felt and crafted with art and feeling. It won the Prix Femina for 2015, and it is not hard to see why.” Ron Slate, reviewer on the On the Seawall website, described the book as “an engrossing narrative streaked with the dreads, routine strangeness, desperate attachments, issues of identity, challenges of displacement, strategies of survival, and ultimately, hunger for living that typified the Boltanski family.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The Safe House: A Novel.
New Yorker, February 5, 2018, Jocelyn Hannah, “Briefly Noted,” review of The Safe House, p. 67.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of The Safe House, p. 98.
ONLINE
Foreword Reviews Online, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (September 27, 2017), Kristine Morris, review of The Safe House.
H-France, https://h-france.net/ (March 21, 2018), Philip Nord, review of La cache: Roman.
On the Seawall, http://www.ronslate.com/ (October 25, 2017), Ron Slate, review of The Safe House.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (November 14, 2017), Bob Duffy, review of The Safe House.
Christophe Boltanski
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christophe Boltanski
ChristopheBoltanskiLM2015.jpg
Christophe Boltanski at salon du livre du Mans in 2015
Born 10 July 1962
Boulogne-Billancourt
Signature
Signature christophe boltanski.png
Christophe Boltanski (born 10 July 1962[1]) is a French journalist, writer and chronicler, laureate of the prix Femina 2015 for his novel La Cache.
Biography[edit]
Christophe Boltanski is the son of sociologist Luc Boltanski and the nephew of linguist Jean-Élie Boltanski and visual artist Christian Boltanski.
After he completed his studies in 1987 at the Centre de formation des journalistes (fr),[2] Christophe Boltanski worked for the Le Progrès Egyptien (within the framework of his national service then for the daily Libération from 1989 to 2007 ; after being a war correspondent during the Gulf war, he was the correspondent of this newspaper in Jerusalem (1995–2000) and then in London (2000–2004).[3] Since 2007 he has been working for the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, while collaborating on the website Rue 89.
In 2000 he was awarded the Prix Bayeux-Calvados des correspondants de guerre for a report on a mine in Congo, in the Nord-Kivu region: "Les Mineurs de l'enfer".[4]
Works[edit]
Essais
Les Sept Vies de Yasser Arafat, Grasset, 1997 ISBN 978-2-246-49601-4
Bethléem : 2000 ans de passion (with Farah Mébarki and Rémi Benali (fr)), at Éditions Tallandier (fr), 2000 ISBN 978-2-235-02278-1
Chirac d'Arabie (Les Mirages d'une politique française) (with Éric Aeschimann), Grasset, 2006 ISBN 978-2-246-69121-1
Minerais de sang : Les esclaves du monde moderne, coll. Folio, 2014 ISBN 978-2-07-045646-8, Grasset, 2012 ISBN 978-2-246-76471-7, photographs by Patrick Robert
Novel
La Cache, Stock, collection bleue, 2015 ISBN 978-2-234-07637-2.[5] – Prix Femina and Prix des prix littéraires (fr) 2015[6]
QUOTED: "grim and, at times, almost surreal."
Briefly Noted
Jocelyn Hannah
The New Yorker. 93.47 (Feb. 5, 2018): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
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Full Text:
Briefly Noted
[...]
The Safe House, by Christophe Boltanski, translated from the French by Laura Marris (Chicago). This novel, based on the author's family history, takes place in a hetel particulier in Paris. At the center of the story are an extraordinary matriarch-a writer who is paralyzed by polio but refuses any sort of walking aid, and who keeps a fierce grip on her progeny-and her husband, a Jewish doctor who, during the Nazi Occupation, hides for more than twenty months in a room on a landing that the family calls "the in-between." Moving through the house, room by room, chapter by chapter, the book takes us progressively deeper into a family mythology that is grim and, at times, almost surreal.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hannah, Jocelyn. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 67. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527789871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6eee6628. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
QUOTED: "Complex and meticulously plotted, this mystery house full of odd characters will make the reader consider storytelling as the building of a physical and mental space."
Boltanski, Christophe: THE SAFE
HOUSE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Boltanski, Christophe THE SAFE HOUSE Univ. of Chicago (Adult Fiction) $24.00 10, 23 ISBN: 978-0-
226-44919-7
Rooms and mysteries nestle within one another in this conceptual novel of family and place.Boltanski's
debut is a lightly fictionalized version of his family history; the Boltanski (or Bolt) family lives together in a
mansion in Paris' exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood. They travel everywhere together in their tiny car.
"We were afraid," the narrator says. "Of everything, of nothing, of others, of ourselves." The matriarch of
the family, crippled by polio she contracted in medical school, relies on her children and grandchildren to
support her weight. "We had become her arms, her legs, extensions of her body." The family moves as a
single unit any time they leave the safety of their house. They develop odd habits as a refusal of the outside
world. Boltanski, the narrator, leads us through the family story one room at a time, looping back into
details multiple times to reveal both the house's and the family's secrets. Members of the family each go by
several different names; lies are told, truths are kept even from each other. No detail is reliable. "Names that
are neat and tidy in order to hide others that beg the same question: 'who are we?'" At the center of the story
and the house is Boltanski's grandfather Etienne Boltanski, who divorced his wife as Nazis arrived in
France, making a scene as he left. But he returned and took up residence in a crawlspace; the family's
barriers--of several kinds--kept him safe. Now they hide from the past, and their house becomes a bulwark
against the world. Boltanski's grandmother "wanted to escape time altogether. No beginning, no
end."Complex and meticulously plotted; this mystery house full of odd characters will make the reader
consider storytelling as the building of a physical and mental space.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Boltanski, Christophe: THE SAFE HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192369/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62e6bb58.
Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192369
QUOTED: "What comes through in this short, smart, funny book is bravery and toughness, especially that of his grandmother."
3/3/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1520131973620 2/2
The Safe House
Publishers Weekly.
264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p98.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Safe House
Christophe Boltanski, trans, from the French by Laura Marris. Univ. of Chicago, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-
226-44919-7
As a child, Boltanski lived with his grandparents in what the French call a hotel particulier, a nobleman's
mansion divided into apartments. But it was particular in the English-language sense as well: individual,
specific, utterly nongeneric. Fittingly, Boltanski tells the story in a most particular way in this novel that,
according to the translator's note, "exists in a borderland between truth and fiction." The book moves
through the large apartment room by room. This Perecesque approach lets him jump in time--sometimes
one of the children sleeping on the floor around his grandparents' bed is his father, sometimes it's him--but
it's the same room. It allows him to cover events he wasn't alive for, particularly the way his Jewish
grandfather survived WWII by hiding in plain sight. The family functioned as a unit led by Boltanski's
fierce grandmother, who, undaunted by Nazis and polio, hid her husband, home-schooled Boltanski's father
and uncles, and wrote prolifically. Despite (or because of?--Boltanski leaves that for the reader to decide)
barely leaving the family home, two of her sons became prominent scholars, and the youngest is the artist
Christian Boltanski. Boltanski describes his family as afraid "of everything, of nothing, of others, of
ourselves," but what comes through in this short, smart, funny book is bravery and toughness, especially
that of his grandmother, who in a world of imaginary and real terrors kept the family safe and together.
(Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Safe House." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 98. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502652576/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd90a84c.
Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652576
QUOTED: "The Safe House gives voice — and vividly so — to the echoes of shared memories, artfully reconstituting them before they fade. Part memoir/part novel, the book evokes the uniquely circumscribed, almost tribal, coexistence of three generations of a family clustered in a sprawling mansion on the upscale Rue de Grenelle in 20th-century Paris."
"Boltanski brilliantly achieves a felt sense of his own dual role as observer of and participant in his family saga."
The Safe House: A Novel
By Christophe Boltanski; translated by Laura Marris University of Chicago Press 240 pp.
Reviewed by Bob Duffy
November 14, 2017
A Parisian manse becomes a metaphorical frame for a century of memories.
The Safe House gives voice — and vividly so — to the echoes of shared memories, artfully reconstituting them before they fade. Part memoir/part novel, the book evokes the uniquely circumscribed, almost tribal, coexistence of three generations of a family clustered in a sprawling mansion on the upscale Rue de Grenelle in 20th-century Paris.
Christophe Boltanski is at once author, narrator, and character in this impressionistic saga spanning nearly a century. Today a professional journalist, the adult Boltanski brilliantly achieves a felt sense of his own dual role as observer of and participant in his family saga.
Early on, the language of this hybrid novel unfolds in sensuous fragments, disjunct visceral impressions, visual catalogs, and dawning shreds of memory. As the Boltanski tribe’s mythos — reflected in the child Christophe’s recollections and received memories — flows onward past to present, the language of The Safe House gives way to the ordered reportage of its adult narrator. Still, Christophe’s finely tuned awareness governs throughout.
Witness his description of an aunt’s dialysis sessions:
“Four whole hours for her blood to be pumped out of her dilated vein, blue and quivering, then passed through one of two needles in her arm into a nest of tubes and valves, of sphincters, of filters, a whole plumbing system that beats at her rhythm, hydrating, cleaning, getting rid of waste, and replenishing missing vitamins.”
The book’s narrative premise — call it architectural — proceeds room-by-room through the sprawling house at the core of the story. Each chapter corresponds to a room or significant space in the mansion and is devoted to an aspect of the Boltanski family’s life, often centering on a key character or two exemplified by the nature of the space.
For example, the kitchen is the setting for toddler Christophe’s recollections of his grandmother in her nurturing aspects, qualities we rarely experience as she — the dominant presence known to them as Mère-Grand — appears in subsequent chapters.
This architectural premise leads to the most memorable of episodes in The Safe House: grandfather Ētienne’s disappearance during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II. Born Jewish, Ētienne is summoned by the authorities, who are seemingly intent on dispatching him to an internment camp. To dodge this fate, Mère-Grand and Ētienne stage his disappearance, fitting out a space in the underfloor (called the “In-Between” in the English translation) that’s been modified into a cramped and undetectable hiding place by a complicit uncle.
None of the other family members have a clue about this. Like the authorities, they believe their grandfather has fled. Only Mère-Grand and the uncle know the truth. To support their cover story, Mère-Grand divorces Ētienne, claiming desertion. For 20 months, he hides by day in his narrow space, emerging only at night to share Mère-Grand’s bed (and ultimately impregnate her), until the Germans withdrawn from the city and he resumes his previous life as a prominent physician.
The “In-Between” is both basis and inspiration for the cover story Mère-Grand devises for the outside world and the family itself. It is the narrative touchstone of The Safe House, the creative engine of the novel in miniature, underscoring the human impulse to layer artifice over actuality and, ultimately, shape and form over received memory.
Similarly, the distinction between inside and outside, private and public, is central throughout. The Boltanski children are held close, discouraged from playing with other kids on the street. In Christophe’s recollection, they all prefer — or are coaxed to prefer — the inside to the outside. To the world out there, grandfather Ētienne is a distinguished physician, Mère-Grand a successful novelist, and Uncle Christian an artist of growing repute. In the private realm of the house (and in the view of Christophe the narrator), they are each something far more.
More than a “safe house” that shelters Ētienne from the Nazis, this mansion also protects and insulates the Boltanski clan from the world beyond its walls, fortifying each as he or she ventures out, often to great success.
That’s the animating irony in The Safe House: Beyond all the hurly-burley of the public realm past the walls, the tribe persists.
Former academic Bob Duffy is a Maryland writer and consultant in advertising and branding.
QUOTED: "Elegant, highly visual, alternatingly airless and soaring on the wind of inspiration, Boltanski’s intimate tale, gracefully translated by Laura Marris, walks a tightwire between darkness and light, melancholy and joy."
THE SAFE HOUSE
Christophe Boltanski
Laura Marris (Translator)
University of Chicago Press (Oct 23, 2017)
Hardcover $24.00 (240pp)
978-0-226-44919-7
Boltanski’s intimate tale walks a tightwire between darkness and light, melancholy and joy.
When French journalist Christophe Boltanski decided, at the age of thirteen, to live with his grandparents, he entered a world apart. His The Safe House is a novelization of that period.
The mansion on the Rue de Grenelle housed three generations, welded together by fierce love and fear “of everything and nothing.” Reigning queen of this tiny world was Boltanski’s paternal grandmother, a small woman with a voracious appetite for life. Sent away from her destitute birth family, she never forgot the abandonment. When polio thwarted her ambitions, she turned all her energy, tenacity, and creativity to keeping her family close to her—within walls to keep the dangers of the world out.
Within these walls, paradox rules: the grandmother is both heiress and communist, and lives as simply as the destitute; held in near reverence, she abhors pity and refuses walking aids, instead maneuvering through life supported by conveniently placed furniture or the arms of her children.
Her husband’s two years in the trenches of WWI had left the sensitive and much-honored doctor with a horror both of blood and of human evil; though a convert to Catholicism, to the Nazis he was still a Jew.
The family traveled without ever leaving the confines of the car, even sleeping, all three generations together, sitting up or curled into each other, like cats in a basket. Mainly homeschooled, the children’s inner worlds were expansive, and creativity flourished. The family’s past, only vaguely remembered, was embellished with fantasy and shrouded in mist to avoid encounters with a possibly unbearable truth.
The confined spaces of that house provide the outline and structure for Boltanski’s novelized recollections of a singular French family marked by WWI and caught up in the horrors of WWII. As he passes from outer to interior rooms, the story becomes more intimate, revealing its beating heart in the bedroom and in the dark space beneath a passageway floor in which his grandfather hid for twenty months.
Elegant, highly visual, alternatingly airless and soaring on the wind of inspiration, Boltanski’s intimate tale, gracefully translated by Laura Marris, walks a tightwire between darkness and light, melancholy and joy.
Reviewed by Kristine Morris
Debut Fiction 2017
QUOTED: "Boltanski’s prose is rich in savory and well-chosen words. The writing is artful, and so too is the book’s construction."
"La Cache represents a going back, a return indoors, but a return in the company of readers who are introduced into a family circle that is bound tight: bound from without by the pressures of an often hostile world and bound from within by an intensity of emotion, centered on the indomitable and regal figure of the author’s Mère-Grand."
"La Cache is a compelling book, deeply felt and crafted with art and feeling. It won the Prix Femina for 2015, and it is not hard to see why."
Philip Nord
Christophe Boltanski’s La Cache is an evocation of the author’s grandparents, Etienne, a doctor, and Myriam, a novelist who published under the pseudonym Annie Lauran. The reader is introduced along the way to the author’s uncles and aunts, themselves a remarkable crew: Jean-Elie, a linguist, Luc, a sociologist, Christophe, an artist, and Anne, a photographer who like her mother used a professional name, in this case Anne Franski. It is a tight-knit clan that lives piled together in a multi-storied apartment on the rue de Grenelle in Paris’ well-heeled VIIe arrondissement. The author himself is part of the scene, moving in at the age of thirteen and camping out in his grandparents’ bedroom for a period alongside uncle Jean-Elie, both cocooned in sleeping bags.
image003
The Boltanskis are a family with secrets. Etienne Boltanski was born a Jew and spent twenty months in hiding during the Occupation. Christophe ferrets out the story, and in this respect La Cache resembles a budding genre of texts that track the consequences of the Holocaust across multiple generations. Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2006) was pioneering in the field, and Boltanski cites Mendelsohn by name. The author, in pursuit of a past shrouded in silence, talks to relatives, sifts through photos and memorabilia, visits archives, and even travels to the Boltanski hometown, Odessa. The writing is spiced with Yiddish phrases. Mère-Grand, as the grandmother is called, makes borscht. And the trauma of the Occupation years leaves its mark. Grandfather’s reappearance after the war frightens Luc, then still a boy; the author describes uncle Jean-Elie as tight-lipped, an observer of the code of Omertà; and Mère-Grand is determined to hold on tight to her brood. The children were not exactly home-schooled, but they spend a lot of time in the apartment away from class; girlfriends are not encouraged; and Jean-Elie in the end never seems to have moved out, inheriting the apartment when his parents die and staying on.
It would not be right, however, to sum up La Cache as a second-generation Holocaust memoir. The book’s dust jacket describes it as a “true novel,” and it behooves the reader to reflect for a moment on what such a descriptor might mean. Boltanski’s prose is rich in savory and well-chosen words. The writing is artful, and so too is the book’s construction. It is written as a tour of the apartment, starting with the family car parked in the courtyard just outside, then moving indoors to the kitchen, and after that proceeding room by room and floor by floor upward to the last space of all, the loft. Along the way the reader is treated to Boltanski’s childhood memories, playing at toy soldiers with uncle Christian in the salon or sledding down the steps from the first floor to the rez-de-chaussée on a pillow. The apartment is a rambling space, littered with furnishings and objects, and these are catalogued in wistful, sometimes humorous detail. Along the way, family stories are recounted that yield up a trove of revelations.
image007
Figure 1: The Boltanski brothers in 1959 (Jean-Elie, Luc, and Christian) source: C. Boltanski, Catalogue of the books, 1992, n° 16 http://archives.carre.pagesperso-orange.fr/Boltanski%20Christian.html
Mère-Grand contracted polio as an adult, but she is a proud woman who refuses to use prosthetics or a cane. She was born into a large, Catholic family that was rightwing, a brother landing in trouble after the war because of too close ties to the Vichy regime. Her parents were cash-strapped, and she was sent as a girl to live with a wealthy benefactress in provincial Mayenne, a woman of faith and the author of pious texts. Mère-Grand, however, rebelled against the world of convention she was born into, marrying a Jewish man and becoming involved in Communist politics, but the revolt was not complete, for after all, she became, like her benefactress, a writer, and not just that, she inherited the benefactress’s land-holdings.
image009
Figure 2 Christian BOLTANSKI: Photographie de ma petite soeur en train de creuser sur la plage de Granville. 1969. Same source.
Then there’s aunt Anne who turns out not to be the author’s biological aunt, for she was adopted and adopted under circumstances that are never spelled out.The professional pseudonym that she invents for herself, Anne Franski, is a melding of two names: Anne Frank and Boltanski, an understandable choice, it would seem, given the grandfather’s Jewish ancestry.
Yet the question of the grandfather’s Jewish identity turns out to be a vexed one. He was circumcised but not told that he was Jewish until later in life. He was from an immigrant family and in certain respects traced an upward trajectory that was characteristic of so many immigrant Jewish boys, distinguishing himself in school and going on to become a doctor. Yet, in the end, grandfather’s story was not so typical. He served in a medical capacity on the front lines in the Great War and was profoundly shaken by the experience. He returned an unsettled man and wound up seeking solace in the Roman Catholic faith. He converted, and when he later married, it was not in synagogue but in church.
image011
Figure 3 source La Cache, p.271
As our cicerone conducts us from one space to the next, the complexities accumulate, and there is even some confusion. So many family members bear more than one name. Multiple generations are in play, and it is not always clear who belongs to which one. And then the pieces fall into place. That moment of clarity arrives in the chapter titled “Entre-deux.” The entre-deux is a liminal space, about the size of train compartment, located on the first floor between the bathroom and the grandparents’ sleeping quarters. It’s also elevated in relation to the nearby landing, reached by climbing a couple of stairs, and what that means is that there’s a hollow underneath that can be turned into a hiding place, la cache of the title.
This is indeed what happened during the war. In 1942, Mère-Grand, taking stock of the danger her husband is in, realizes that he has to vanish, and a scheme is concocted to make his disappearance convincing. The grandparents get a divorce. The story is circulated that Etienne Boltanski has moved to the southern zone, and it’s arranged to have letters written in his hand sent from there to Paris. Yet, all the while, grandfather is really concealed beneath the entre-deux, a secret that Jean-Elie is in on but not Luc. Grandfather comes out at night to sleep with Mère-Grand who in fact becomes pregnant. By a stroke of luck, the Liberation arrives before the baby, saving the family from some awkward explanations, and that is how uncle Christian came into the world.
The “between two floors” is an actual space, the “belly button” of the household as the author describes it. But it’s also a way of being, the grandfather’s first of all, who is wedged between two faiths, Jewish and Catholic. It also the grandmother’s who owns property and counts mean-spirited Vichyssois among her relatives, even as she herself socializes with bohemian types and distributes the Party newspaper, L’Humanité, on Sundays. In fact, it is that of the whole Boltanski clan, and the author finds a telling image for this state of in-between-ness: the family Christmas tree which was decorated at the top with the yellow Star of David that the Occupation authorities had obliged grandfather to wear.
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Figure 4 Faux autoportraits: quelque part le jeune Christophe Boltanski © Christian Boltanski
But what about the author himself? La Cache is a story about grandparents, but, of course, it is also one about Christophe Boltanski. He too has his secrets. His father, Luc, was an FLN sympathizer during the Algerian war, and his mother, unnamed, hid an FLN operative sought after by the police, who was later caught. The author’s parents went into hiding in their turn, not in “the hiding place” (though that option was considered), but elsewhere. Christophe was born not long thereafter, the circumstances of his own birth replicating those of uncle Christian.
And then, sometime in the mid-seventies for reasons never explained, the author leaves his own family to relocate to the rue de Grenelle sanctuary. He sleeps in the grandparents’ room but later moves upstairs to the loft. That’s where uncle Christian’s atelier is located, and at one end of the room, Luc fashions a space apart for his son, separated from the rest by a sliding panel. Here, Christophe settles in and pictures himself hunted after by enemies of all kinds. He imagines escaping through a skylight to the roof or concealing his presence altogether behind a fake wall, thereby transforming, if only in imagination, his own corner of the loft into a hiding place, yet one more. There are hiding places everywhere then: the entre-deux, Christophe’s bedroom in the loft, and, indeed, the rue de Grenelle apartment itself, understood as a refuge where the Boltanski tribe in its entirety can wall itself in against an unwelcoming world beyond.
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Figure 5 source: http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2015/08/27/les-boltanski-en-lieu-sur_4738260_3260.html
In this light, the notion of in-between-ness takes on yet one more layer of meaning. It is grandfather’s hiding space, of course. It is also that mix of religions that the author himself works so hard to sort out. He could have left it all behind after all. His mother wasn’t Jewish; his father was a convert; and he himself is named Christophe. Yet Boltanski opts instead to look through the drawers of his grandfather’s secretary and to pull out the yellow star that is stored within and bring it to view. But there is yet a third meaning to in-between-ness. The Boltanski family lives poised between its life inside the rue de Grenelle apartment and the world out-of-doors. The author talks of his father Luc struggling to escape, and he will make an escape of his own. Christophe Boltanski is drafted and performs his military service in Cairo working at a Francophone newspaper of progressive and cosmopolitan views, beginning a career in journalism and letters that he has pursued ever since. La Cache represents a going back, a return indoors, but a return in the company of readers who are introduced into a family circle that is bound tight: bound from without by the pressures of an often hostile world and bound from within by an intensity of emotion, centered on the indomitable and regal figure of the author’s Mère-Grand. It is with her death, that this “true novel” ends.
La Cache is a compelling book, deeply felt and crafted with art and feeling. It won the Prix Femina for 2015, and it is not hard to see why.
Christophe Boltanski, La Cache, Paris: Stock, 2015.
QUOTED: "an engrossing narrative streaked with the dreads, routine strangeness, desperate attachments, issues of identity, challenges of displacement, strategies of survival, and ultimately, hunger for living that typified the Boltanski family."
October 25th, 2017
In Paris, the term hôtel particulier describes a grand residence with an interior courtyard, often owned by nobility from the countryside who would stay there while visiting the city. Many of these “townhouses” were constructed in the 1600’s. In 1935, Christophe Boltanski’s grandfather, Étienne, moved his wife, his firstborn son, and his mother to rented rooms in a hôtel particulier on Rue de Grenelle in the Seventh Arrondissement. Étienne had just been promoted to a hospital chief of staff, and his wife, Myriam, was also a physician.
Boltanski_Hotel.jpgIn Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House, the rooms of their living space provide the armature for an engrossing narrative streaked with the dreads, routine strangeness, desperate attachments, issues of identity, challenges of displacement, strategies of survival, and ultimately, hunger for living that typified the Boltanski family. This is a story about history – familial, personal, tribal, national. More specifically, the telling is vivified by the impulses that history evokes, one of which is to reanimate history itself – which perhaps is why Boltanski calls this book a “novel.” His attuned Anglophone translator, Laura Marris, says the work “exists in a borderland between truth and fiction, the kind of space where definitions of genre sometimes force a divide.”
Because the Boltanskis, an unconventional and non-practicing Jewish family, faced the life-choking restrictions and fatal round-ups ordered by their French leaders and carried out by their neighbors in the early 1940’s, The Safe House inevitably will be labeled as a next-generation Holocaust narrative. But speaking about the past, especially the traumatic years of the Occupation, is something family members rarely did: "Photos are forbidden in the Rue de Grenelle because they show what no longer exists." Christophe Boltanski is a journalist by trade and reinvented the past through interviews, archives, and travel to places like Odessa, the birthplace of his great-grandparents who emigrated to France.
BoltanskiColor.jpgBorn in 1962, Christophe came to live with his grandparents in the mid-1970s. His aunt Anne, just four years older than he, lived there, too, as well as his uncles Jean-Élie and Christian. They all serve the matriarch, grandmother Myriam: stricken by polio in the 1930’s but undeterred and rebellious, political activist, a novelist and essayist who wrote under the name Annie Lauran. The seventh child of conservative Catholic parents, Myriam was given away to a wealthy childless widow and inherited her lands and aging estate. “There were always two sides to her,” he writes. “Both landowner and card-carrying Communist, excluded and elected, adopted and advantaged, handicapped and globe-trotting, powerless and omnipotent, grandmother and Big Bad Wolf.”
This is the opening paragraph of the chapter titled “Staircase”:
“She wove between obstacles, following a fixed choreography. Always with Anne and Jean-Élie by her side, held by the vise of their arms, in the pincer of their bodies. The repetitive nature of her gestures, their slowness, my aunt and uncle’s gravity as they helped her walk, gave each of her movements a solemn air, like a procession. Despite her limping gait, she resembled a queen, parading around her rooms at the appointed hour, in the company of her court. Her entrance was announced by creaking doors, sounds of furniture moving, and the irregular clacking of her heels on the parquet. It took tremendous energy to get from one floor to another. She groped along the staircase with her birdlike claws, gripping the metal bannister that hugged the rounded wall, counteracting her paralyzed legs with the strength of her arms and her fists, raising her pelvis to lift a foot, placing it on the step, pressing on it as if it were a wooden pillar, making her second leg pivot, throwing it forward, her face tight, leaning all her weight on her children, and slowly beginning to climb with the fearful majesty of the disabled.”
BoltanskiCover.jpegLater he says of her, “She floundered, not like a wounded animal, but like a fawn caught in a snare.” The compelling descriptiveness of The Safe House is modulated with anecdote and fact, and a nimble shifting between time periods that accumulate into yet another secret, the one carried by the narrator himself, a perpetual disquietude rising from his own griefs. In 1942, grandfather Étienne went into hiding in his own house for 20 months, scrambling into a hiding place at the slightest alarm; he and Myriam divorced for show and remarried after the war. Christophe is hiding as well within his narrative of the house. The book was published in France in 2015 with the title La cache, the hiding place.
Revealing the hiding place to the world, noting the outdated furnishings and collected objects ("luxury mixed with want"), relating the idiosyncrasies of their meals – all of this entails risk because of an endemic threat hiding in the present moment. The enduring threat, unstated but evoked through story and memory, also supplies the motivation to speak out. This is the tension in the artfully tense and apt phrasing, the groping for an original form. Boltanski’s father, Luc, wished to escape from Rue de Grenelle and was an FLN sympathizer during the Algerian war; he and Boltanski’s mother also went into hiding and Christophe was born soon after. The shadow of the hunter falls upon the son.
After the death of his great-grandmother, Christophe’s grandparents traveled by car to Odessa – but at the last moment, Étienne refused to enter the city. Boltanski writes, “There’s one last explanation for grand-papa’s refusal to see Odessa: the fear of not feeling at home in the very place where his parents were born and raised. Feeling like a stranger there. Discovering that he wasn’t different from others but from his own people. Understanding the full measure of what had been passed down to him … And the vertigo of being alive, thanks only to exile and chance. Because of being, understandably, from elsewhere. To know that those who stayed were murdered. In Ellis Island, Georges Perec wrote that he could have been “Australian, Argentinian, English, or Swedish, but in the practically unlimited array of possibilities, one thing was explicitly forbidden: I could not be born in my ancestors’ country, in Lubartow or Warsaw, or grow up there within a tradition, a language, a community.”
The Safe House earned Boltanski the Prix Femina for 2015. Deftly weaving its complexities, Boltanski has captured that sense of the vertigo of being alive.
[Published October 23, 2017. 233 pages, $24.00 hardcover]