Contemporary Authors

1. The perfect nanny : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038080 Slimani, Leïla, 1981- author. Chanson douce. English The perfect nanny : a novel / Leila Slimani ; translated from the French by Sam Taylor. New York : Penguin Books, [2018] 228 pages ; 20 cm PQ2719.L56 C4313 2018 ISBN: 9780143132172 (paperback)

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2146382/leila-slimani

  About the Author

  Leila Slimani is the first Moroccan (and pregnant) woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt, which she won for The Perfect Nanny. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%AFla_Slimani

  Leïla Slimani
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Leïla Slimani
  Leïla Slimani (21e Maghreb des Livres, Paris, 7 et 8 février 2015).jpg
  Leïla Slimani in 2015
  Born 3 October 1981
  Rabat, Morocco
  Residence Paris
  Nationality

  French Moroccan

  Alma mater

  Sciences Po ESCP Europe

  Occupation

  Author journalist

  Known for The Perfect Nanny (novel)
  Children 2
  Parent(s) Othman Slimani (father)

  Leïla Slimani (born 3 October 1981[1]) is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. In 2016 she was awarded the Prix Goncourt for her novel Chanson douce.

  Contents

  1 Life
  2 Work
  2.1 Fiction
  2.2 Non-fiction
  2.3 Books
  3 Notes
  4 External links

  Life

  Slimani maternal grandmother Anne Dhobb (née Ruetsch, born 1921) grew up in Alsace and met her husband Lakhdar Dhobb, a Moroccan colonel in the French Colonial Army, first in 1944 during the liberation of France. After the war she followed him back to Morocco, where they lived in Meknes. By publishing an autobiographical novel in 2003 she became a first writer in the family. Her daughter and Slimani's mother is Béatrice-Najat Dhobb-Slimani, an otolaryngologist, who married the French educated Moroccan economist Othman Slimani. The couple had three daughters, Slimani being the middle one. She was born in Rabat on 3 October 1981 and grew up in liberal, French speaking household and attended French schools. An important rupture in Slimani's childhood occurred in 1993 when her father was (falsely) implicated in a finance scandal and fired from his poisition as president of the CIH Bank[2][3]

  Slimani left Morocco at the age of 17 for Paris to study political science and media studies at the Sciences Po and ESCP Europe. After her graduation she temporarily considered a career as an actress, completed an acting course and appeared in supporting roles in two films. She married her husband, a Parisien banker whom she met first in 2005, on 24 April 2008 and started to work as a journalist for the magazine Jeune Afrique on 6 October of the same year. The work required her to travel a lot and after her son was born in 2011 and she got arrested in Tunisia while reporting on the Arab Spring, she decided to quit her job at Jeune Afrique and to pursue freelance work and write a novel instead. The novel however was rejected by publishers. In 2013 Slimani took a writing workshop by Jean-Marie Laclavetine, a novelist and editor at Gallimard. He took an interest in Slimani's writing and helped her to improve her style and in 2014 Slimani published her first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogre ("In the Garden of the Ogre") with Gallimard. The novel fared well with French critics and received La Mamounia literary award in Morocco. Two years later Dans le jardin de l’ogre was followed by the psychological thriller Chanson douce, which won Prix Goncourt, turned her into a literary star in France and made her known to international audiences as well. In 2017 her daughter was born.[4][5][2][1][6]

  Aside from her native Moroccan citizenship Slimani also hold a French one due to her Alsatian heritage.[5][2]
  Work
  Fiction

  Slimani's first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogre tells the story a woman being afflicted by sexual addiction. that loses control of her life due to her addiction. Slimani got the idea for her story after seeing the Dominique Strauss-Kahn unfolding news. The novel fared well with French critics and in Morocco it received the La Mamounia literary award.[7][2]

  Chansons douce ("sweet song") is the story of a double murder of two young siblings by their nanny, inspired by the killing by a nanny of the Krim children in Manhattan in 2012. The novel starts off with immediate aftermath of the murder and then recounts the backstory of the parents, a liberal upper middle class Parisian couple, and their nanny, who is economically and psychologically struggling. Slimani named the nanny Louise after Louise Woodward, a British au pair in the US that was convicted of involuntary manslaughter of the toddler in her care. The novel was well received by French critics and quickly turned into a bestseller with over 76,000 copies printed within three months even before the book was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2016. Subsequently it became the most read book in France of that year with over 450,000 copies printed and by the end of 2017 around 600,000 copies had been sold in France. It has been translated into 18 languages, with 17 more to come; the English translation of her novel was published in 2018 as The Perfect Nanny in the US and as Lullaby in the UK.[2][8]
  Non-fiction

  Slimani worked for several years as journalist reporting on Northern Africa and the Maghreb, among other on the Arab Spring in 2011. Her book Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc ("Sex and Lies: Sex Life in Morocco") compiles the accounts of many different women, she had interviewed while being on a book tour throughout Morocco.[9]
  Books

  La baie de Dakhla : itinérance enchantée entre mer et désert. Casablanca: Malika Editions. 2013. ISBN 9789954037669. OCLC 889653067.
  Dans le jardin de l'ogre. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. 2014. ISBN 9782070146239. OCLC 889705369.
  Chanson douce. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. 2016. ISBN 9782070196678. OCLC 957971440.

  US edition: The Perfect Nanny. Penguin Random House. 2018. ISBN 978-0-143-13217-2.
  UK edition: Lullaby. Faber & Faber. 2018. ISBN 978-0-571-33753-8.

  Le diable est dans les détails. Éditions de l'Aube. 2016. ISBN 9782815921442.
  Sexe et mensonges : La vie sexuelle au Maroc. Les Arènes, Paris, 2017 ISBN 978-2-35204-568-7
  Paroles d'honneur. Les Arènes, Paris, 2017, ISBN 978-2-35204-654-7

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/books/prix-goncourt-leila-slimani.html

  Leïla Slimani Wins Prix Goncourt, France’s Top Literary Award

  By BENOÎT MORENNENOV. 3, 2016
  Photo
  Leïla Slimani, a French-Moroccan novelist, interviewed in Paris on Thursday after she won France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Credit Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

  PARIS — Leïla Slimani, a French-Moroccan novelist, was awarded France’s top literary accolade, the Prix Goncourt, on Thursday for her book “Chanson Douce” (“Sweet Song”), a thriller that opens with the killing of two young children by their caretaker.

  Several commentators had predicted that Ms. Slimani would win. The novel has been a best seller — more than 76,000 copies have been purchased — and Ms. Slimani, 35, has a high profile as a former journalist at Jeune Afrique, a French-language magazine of African news.

  “She’s a young woman, talented, so we’re completely in the spirit of the Goncourt prize,” Bernard Pivot, the head of the Goncourt Academy, said at a Facebook Live chat organized by the newspaper Le Figaro on Thursday.

  Ms. Slimani, who left Morocco for France at 17 and enrolled at Sciences Po in Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious universities, made her entrance onto the literary scene in 2014 with the critically acclaimed novel “Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre” (“In the Ogre’s Garden”), a look at the life of a sex-addicted woman in some of the most chic neighborhoods of Paris.

  “Chanson Douce,” Ms. Slimani’s second novel, published by Gallimard, received the award over three others: “L’Autre Qu’On Adorait” (“The Other We Loved”), Catherine Cusset’s poignant tribute to a friend who took his own life; “Cannibales” (“Cannibals”), a sophisticated and cruel epistolary novel by the seasoned author Régis Jauffret; and “Petit Pays” (“Little Country”), by the French-Rwandan author Gaël Faye.
  Continue reading the main story
  Related Coverage

  The French Literati and the Arab World Do a Complicated Dance DEC. 18, 2015
  Prix Goncourt - Jonathan Littell - Report NOV. 7, 2006

  “Chanson Douce” is set against the backdrop of a 40-something middle-class couple in Paris eager to attain a certain level of wealth and comfort. Louise, a young and sophisticated nanny, is in their blind spot.

  “The subject came from the fact that I myself had nannies growing up in Morocco,” Ms. Slimani said on Thursday. “At 7 or 8, I was already very sensitive to the very strange position they had in the house; they were both women we loved as mothers, and strangers. I was always touched by their difficult position, sometimes by the humiliations they might go through.” Ms. Slimani said she discovered “new kinds of nannies” when she arrived in Paris, adding, “I’ve discovered they can be very romantic characters.”
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  The novel, which draws on elements from the real story of a nanny from the Dominican Republic who has been accused of killing two children under her care in New York in 2012, pieces together disparate events that culminate in a nightmarish outcome.

  The 10 members of the Goncourt Academy, which awards the prize, made their announcement at the Paris restaurant Drouant, where the winners have been presented since 1914. (The prize is given for works in French, but recipients do not need to be French citizens.)

  “It’s a novel on class struggle in a bourgeois apartment about possession of the children’s love,” Mr. Pivot told Le Figaro.

  Ms. Slimani is the 12th woman to win the Prix Goncourt; the previous female winner was Lydie Salvayre, a child of Spanish exiles, in 2014. Last year, it was awarded to Mathias Énard, a scholar of Arabic and Persian who lives in Barcelona, for “La Boussole” (“The Compass”).

  Other past winners include Robert Merle (1949), Francis Walder (1958), Michel Tournier (1970), Patrick Modiano (1978), Yann Queffélec (1985), Pierre Combescot (1991), Jonathan Littell (2006), Michel Houellebecq (2010) and Pierre Lemaitre (2013).

  Follow Benoît Morenne on Twitter @benmorenne.

  A version of this article appears in print on November 4, 2016, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: French-Moroccan Writer Wins Prix Goncourt. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

The Perfect Nanny
Publishers Weekly.
264.44 (Oct. 30, 2017): p60. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Perfect Nanny
Leila Slimani, trans, from the French by Sam Taylor. Penguin, $16 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-14-313217-2
Slimani received France's Goncourt Prize for this unsettling tale of a nanny who insinuates herself into every aspect of her employers' lives, with tragic results. When Parisian housewife Myriam Masse accepts a job as a lawyer, she and her husband, Paul, hire Louise, an unassuming, doll-like woman in her 40s, to watch their two children. Initially enamored of Louise's quiet competence, delicious cooking, and constant availability, Myriam and Paul eventually find her dominating their lives in unwelcome ways. As they steel themselves for a confrontation, Louise preempts them in a shocking act of violence. Slimani expertly probes Myriam's guilt at leaving her children with a stranger and the secret economy of nannies in Paris's tony professional districts. Taylor's spare, understated translation underscores the quiet desperation, economic struggles, and crushing loneliness that build to Louise's final act. Those seeking a thought- provoking character study will appreciate this gripping anatomy of a crime. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Perfect Nanny." Publishers Weekly, 30 Oct. 2017, p. 60. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514357748/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=020f39ae. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514357748
1 of 5 2/27/18, 11:02 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Perfect Nanny
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.6 (Nov. 15, 2017): p23. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Perfect Nanny.
By Leila Slimani. Tr. by Sam Taylor.
Jan. 2018.240p. Penguin, paper, $16 (9780143132172).
Winner of Frances prestigious Prix Goncourt, Moroccan French author Slimani's first book to be published in the U.S is a devastating, entrancing, literary psychological drama supported by absorbing character studies. Readers first step into a veritable crime scene: a baby and his toddler sister are dead, or soon to be, in an apartment in Paris' tenth arrondissement. Their blissfully unaware mother, Myriam, meanwhile leaves work early, for a change, to surprise them. Then Slimani takes us back to the true beginning, to learn how happy Myriam was to escape the monotony of stayat-home parenting after the birth of her second child and how impressed she and her husband, Paul, were by the nanny, Louise, who arrives highly recommended and whom the children immediately adore. Slimani's skills are many, and her novel is fabulously translated by Taylor. Myriam and Paul's constant nagging fears for their children are mundane, relatable, and gut-wrenching, given the end readers already know. As Louise's dark past, emotional stuntedness, and heinous volatility emerge through cracks in her meticulous, porcelain exterior, readers won't be able to look away.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Perfect Nanny." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 23. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441723/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ce6e0589. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517441723
2 of 5 2/27/18, 11:02 PM

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Book World: Worried about your
nanny? Here's a novel in which your
worst nightmare is realized
Maureen Corrigan
The Washington Post.
(Jan. 5, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Maureen Corrigan
The Perfect Nanny
By Leila Slimani. Translated from the French by Sam Taylor Penguin. 234 pp. Paperback. $16
---
The first "hot" novel of 2018 is Leila Slimani's international blockbuster, "The Perfect Nanny," which has just been translated into English. But, be forewarned: Those readers sure to be most curious about it are the very readers who would do best avoid it. The last thing working mothers with young children need to be reading in their nanosecond of downtime is this psychological suspense novel about a "perfect" nanny who snaps.
The book aspires toward the taut elegance of that classic nanny nightmare tale, Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" and, in language and complexity, it comes pretty darn close. Indeed, Slimani's novel won France's most prestigious literary honor, the Goncourt Prize, when it was published there in 2016; Slimani is the first Moroccan-born woman to be so honored. The voice of Slimani's omniscient third-person narrator is consistently chill and precise; her plot spares neither her characters' fates nor her readers' sensibilities. The opening sentences of "The Perfect Nanny" warn us that this is a story in which the worst that can happen and, in fact, just has:
"The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. The doctor said he didn't suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a gray bag, which they zipped shut. The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. ... On the way to the hospital, she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions. ... Her lungs had been punctured, her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers."
3 of 5 2/27/18, 11:02 PM

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The two children have been murdered by their longtime nanny. Their mother, Myriam, discovers this grotesque scene upon her return home to the family's small apartment in Paris. Again, this discovery occurs within the opening pages of the novel, so the intrigue here derives not from what has happened, but why? The nanny, Louise, is the central enigma of Slimani's novel - a human black hole who swirls into the family's living room one day and relentlessly pulls in and extinguishes the light in everyone's lives.
As unflinching as Slimani is in her descriptions of the grisly damage that can be inflicted on the human body, she's just as assured in assessing mental and emotional bruises and breakages, particularly as they develop in the intricate relationship between Louise and her employers. After its horrific opening chapter, "The Perfect Nanny" flashes back to Louise's initial entrance into the lives of Miriam and her husband, Paul; to a time when the couple was naively confident that they could spot any looming problems with a prospective nanny. Throwing political correctness out the window, Paul decrees "no illegal immigrants ... not too old, no veils, and no smokers."
Myriam (like Slimani herself) is Moroccan-French and though she has confronted racism in Paris, refuses to hire any North Africans: "She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic ... asking her all sorts of favors in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity."
The couple has interviewed a parade of unsuitable women before the birdlike, middle-aged Louise walks in, perfectly perfect in every way down to her prim Peter Pan collar. In a few short weeks, Louise takes charge, not only of the two children, but also of their needy parents:
"Myriam lets herself be mothered. Every day she abandons more tasks to a grateful Louise. The nanny is like those figures at the back of a theater stage who move the sets around in darkness. She picks up a couch, pushes a cardboard column or a wall with one hand. ... She is Vishnu, the nurturing divinity, jealous and protective; the she-wolf at whose breast they drink, the infallible source of their family happiness."
What's the appeal of this setup for Louise readers may well wonder? Ah, that's for Slimani's aloof narrator to slowly reveal. As Louise becomes increasingly untethered from reality, we learn more about her own grim family background and the miserable apartment she returns to every evening, which she regards as a mere "lair, a parenthesis where she comes to hide her exhaustion."
Poetic phrases like that one abound throughout Slimani's novel and elevate it well above its formulaic premise, one that has inspired many a Lifetime television movie. But, the irony is that for all its fine language, the takeaway of "The Perfect Nanny" is pretty much the same as the feminist backlash message of those movies, as of well as that 1992 cinematic cultural touchstone, "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle." Namely, there is no "perfect nanny"; indeed, the nanny who's tending to your children may well be a psycho. Is any career worth that risk, ladies?
Surely it's the enduring masochistic power of that nightmare - rendered particularly vivid here through Slimani's great stylistic gifts - that have made this slim novel an international best-seller. Talk about a guilty pleasure.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Corrigan, Maureen. "Book World: Worried about your nanny? Here's a novel in which your worst
nightmare is realized." Washington Post, 5 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521501953/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6f3e413c. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521501953
5 of 5 2/27/18, 11:02 PM

"The Perfect Nanny." Publishers Weekly, 30 Oct. 2017, p. 60. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514357748/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=020f39ae. Accessed 27 Feb. 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "The Perfect Nanny." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 23. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441723/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ce6e0589. Accessed 27 Feb. 2018. Corrigan, Maureen. "Book World: Worried about your nanny? Here's a novel in which your worst nightmare is realized." Washington Post, 5 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521501953/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6f3e413c. Accessed 27 Feb. 2018.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/leila-slimani/the-perfect-nanny/
  Word count: 383

  KIRKUS REVIEW

  This novel about a murderous nanny, Moroccan author Slimani’s first to be published in the U.S., was awarded the 2016 Priz Goncourt.

  Inspired by a 2012 case involving an Upper West Side nanny accused of killing two children in her charge, Slimani’s novel moves the story to a similarly upscale locale, the tenth arrondissement of Paris. Since the book opens with the murders, leaving no doubt as to the culprit, the reader quickly gathers that the inquiry here is not who did it but why. A narrative that is chiefly flashback attempts to reverse-engineer an explanation. Louise, a middle-aged widow with an estranged adult daughter, is hired by a professional couple to look after their young children, Mila and Adam. The father, Paul, is a rising music producer, and the mother, Myriam, an attorney who's just taken a demanding position at a law firm. Myriam and Paul are pleasantly surprised by Louise’s spectacular suitability for her job: not only does she quickly win over the children with her creative games and sense of play, but she goes above and beyond a nanny’s role, becoming a housekeeper and general factotum. Never has the apartment looked so clean, never have meals been so appetizing and nourishing. Her employers take Louise along on their summer vacation to Greece, where she begins to see possibilities beyond her constricted life. However, the idyll is threatened on all sides when the pathology underlying Louise’s perfectionism begins to emerge. The near-omniscient point of view darts in and out of the consciousness of many characters, some quite marginal. Consequently, the depiction of internal pressures building to a homicidal pitch is fragmentary at best. Ultimately, the evidence against Louise, whether of compulsive behavior, mental illness, bad luck, or just extreme loneliness, does not add up to a motive for infanticide. The prose, despite Taylor’s often slapdash translation, manages to convey an atmosphere of creeping dread reminiscent of Modiano, but with more lurid details.

  The why of this horrific crime remains unfathomable, rendering it all the more frightening.
  Pub Date: Jan. 9th, 2018
  ISBN: 978-0-14-313217-2
  Page count: 234pp
  Publisher: Penguin
  Review Posted Online: Sept. 28th, 2017
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15th, 2017

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/books/review/crime-perfect-nanny-leila-slimani.html
  Word count: 1194

  Keep Watch Over Your Children: Danger Lurks Everywhere

  Crime

  By MARILYN STASIO JAN. 19, 2018
  Photo
  Credit Pablo Amargo

  When a character in a crime novel snaps and kills a child, it’s usually a mother stressed beyond endurance. In Leila Slimani’s unnerving cautionary tale, THE PERFECT NANNY (Penguin, paper, $16), subtly translated by Sam Taylor, we know from the outset that it’s a beloved and trusted nanny who murders the two children in her care. That’s pretty radical for a domestic thriller; but what’s more remarkable about this unconventional novel (which was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt) is the author’s intimate analysis of the special relationship between a mother and a nanny.

  Myriam and Paul, the Parisian couple who hire Louise to help care for their son and daughter, are delighted to discover that she’s “a miracle worker” who cleans, reorganizes the household and even cooks delicious meals. “Nothing rots, nothing expires” in Louise’s kitchen. At first, they bask in their unexpected comfort, “like spoiled children, like purring cats.” Much too late, Myriam realizes that the new nanny may not be entirely benevolent: “She is Vishnu, the nurturing divinity, jealous and protective.” But already Louise “has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her.” Despite Myriam’s fears, Louise has no intention of replacing her as the woman of the house; rather, in her pathological loneliness, the nanny increasingly fantasizes that she has become a de facto member of the family.

  Slimani writes devastatingly perceptive character studies. Dropping their children at day care, the mothers are “rushed and sad,” the children “little tyrants.” She also raises painful questions. Could Myriam be projecting onto her nanny her own forbidden desire to be free of her children and their insatiable needs? (“They’re eating me alive,” she thinks.) Is there an element of racial prejudice in the Moroccan-born Myriam’s attitude toward her French nanny? Is Louise’s pitiless act the transference of her forbidden feelings about her privileged employer? One thing is clear: Loneliness can drive you crazy, and extreme loneliness can make you homicidal.

  ♦

  The intense thrills of Thomas Perry’s THE BOMB MAKER (Mysterious Press, $26) are almost unbearable. After sweating through a scene in which a member of the Los Angeles Police Department Bomb Squad narrowly escapes a lethal explosion, we’re knocked back by the loss of 14 team technicians — half the squad — who are blown to smithereens. “Bombs were acts of murder,” Perry writes, but “they were also jokes on you, riddles the bomber hoped were too tough for you.”

  Dick Stahl, who steps in to head the depleted squad, doesn’t get the joke, but he goes mano a mano with the abominable riddler, whose clear intention is to destroy those who respond to his devilishly clever booby traps. There seems to be no pattern to the placement of these “well-designed, insidious and psychologically astute” devices, which turn up at a gas station, a school cafeteria and a hospital ward. Before they go off, the tension is killing. And when they do, the damage is spectacular.
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  ♦

  Driving up and down Utah’s desolate Route 117 with the trucker Ben Jones is an education. LULLABY ROAD (Crown, $26), James Anderson’s second novel (after “The Never-Open Desert Diner”), introduces us to more of the “desert rats, hardscrabble ranchers and other assorted exiles” who choose to live off the grid and depend on Ben’s Desert Moon Delivery Service for food and water and the occasional luxury, like soap. Some of Ben’s customers are deep thinkers like Roy Cuthbert, who suggests holding Second Amendment Days (“with a huge gun show and fast-draw competition”) to save the town of Rockmuse from sinking into the desert sands. Other, more desperate people, like Pedro, the tire man at the Stop ‘n’ Gone Truck Stop, trust him to transport a small child and a large dog in his 28-foot tractor-trailer rig. Ben is nothing if not a decent man, and Anderson rewards him with a deadly adventure and the most poetic prose this side of Salt Lake City.

  ♦

  Karen Ellis’s A MAP OF THE DARK (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) is a valiant, if unsuccessful attempt to contain an intensely personal narrative within the structure of a traditional police procedural. Special Agent Elsa Myers of the F.B.I.’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment division is assigned to the case of 17-year-old Ruby Haverstock, who went missing after finishing her shift at a cafe in Queens. Even from the little we learn about her, Ruby seems like a clever, resourceful girl.
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  Revered and Feared in the Book Review JUNE 25, 2017
  Leïla Slimani Wins Prix Goncourt, France’s Top Literary Award NOV. 3, 2016
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  For some reason that isn’t made clear, this particular case awakens Myers’s memories of mistreatment at the hands of her unstable and abusive mother. That may shed some light on the agent’s secret habit of cutting herself with the Swiss Army knife she keeps with her at all times. (“The puncture of metal, the breaking of skin, comes with a rush of sensation that assures you that you are real after all.”) But it doesn’t begin to explain how she can cut herself until she bleeds and still handle such a demanding and dangerous job.
  Correction: January 23, 2018

  An earlier version of the review of Karen Ellis’s “A Map of the Dark” contained a parenthetical aside that misrepresented the actions of one of the characters.

  Marilyn Stasio has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

  Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), and sign up for our newsletter.

  A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2018, on Page BR7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Nanny Dearest. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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• WBUR- The Artery
  http://www.wbur.org/artery/2018/01/19/the-perfect-nanny-review
  Word count: 1339

  'The Perfect Nanny' Doesn't Hide From The Depths Of Darkness
  January 19, 2018

  John Winters

  Author Leila Slimani. (Courtesy Catherine Hélie/Editions Gallimard)
  closemore
  Author Leila Slimani. (Courtesy Catherine Hélie/Editions Gallimard)

  While reading about the descent into madness of eponymous character in “The Perfect Nanny,” I was reminded of a poem by Charles Bukowski, where he writes that mental breakdowns result not after a single blow or setback, but by accretion:

  it’s not the large things that
  send a man to the
  madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
  murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood …
  no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
  that send a man to the
  madhouse …
  not the death of his love
  but a shoelace that snaps
  with no time left ...

  The tumble into mental illness, to the outside world, can sometimes look like no change at all. Mental collapse doesn’t announce itself like a bad cough or a constant limp. Sometimes it sneaks up and nestles deep within before anyone else takes notice.

  And so it is in Leila Slimani’s American debut. In its French incarnation, “Chanson Douce,” the novel earned the Moroccan-born Parisian the Goncourt Prize and made her a star in her homeland. I doubt the same reaction will take hold here in the States, unless Oprah falls in love with the book. “The Perfect Nanny” is, quite simply enough, a simple story, well told (and Sam Taylor's translation maintains the author's directness). Slimani’s characters are well drawn, and she laces her narrative with acute observations, and seems intent to let no one off the hook for the terrible act at the heart of the story.
  (Courtesy Penguin Random House)
  (Courtesy Penguin Random House)

  That act is drawn from real life; Slimani had read of a New York nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, who in 2012 killed two of the children in her care before trying to take her own life. This gives rise to the author’s stunner of an opening: “The baby is dead,” Slimani writes. Shocking words made even more immediate in the present tense. Throughout the novel, Slimani flits seamlessly between tenses, and plays with the chronology of her tale. Her matter-of-fact tone adds a layer of creepiness to many of the novel’s 228 pages.

  Since we know the ending from page one, the only questions are how and why we get there.

  “The Perfect Nanny” transplants the story to Paris, where Myriam and Paul Massé live with their two children in a smallish apartment in the city’s upscale 10th Arrondissement. She’s a lawyer sidelined as a stay-at-home mom, he’s a record producer looking for a big break. Once the garish, but wonderfully rendered, opening scene is dispensed with, Slimani takes us back to the day the couple decides to hire a nanny.

  They settle on a 40-something widow named Louise whose own 19-year-old daughter, Stéphanie, was a disappointment and has left home. The new nanny is as flawless as the novel’s title suggests. Childcare settled, Myriam goes back to lawyering, and it would seem the family is set to realize all its bourgeois dreams.

  Slimani begins soon after planting seeds that will lead logically to the horrible dénouement. Paul and Myriam begin considering Louise not just a great find, but as their property. Myriam tries hard not to see her children as impediments to her career and happiness, gladly letting the nanny be the "she wolf" that cares for and protects them. Meanwhile, Louise slowly begins to demonstrate some worrisome traits: The stories she reads to the children are full of, not sugar plum fairies, but tragedy; she has a slight, if undeveloped, taste for S&M; and she becomes possessive of the children so much so that when she’s alone, she feels lost. More than anything, Louise wants to belong.

  “Solitude,” Slimani writes, “was like a vast hole into which Louise watched herself sink. Solitude, which stuck to her flesh, to her clothes, began to model her features, making her move like a little old lady.”
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  The writing is knowing and the descriptions of Louise’s long slow mental collapse feels scarily real. This is the book’s greatest strength, the nanny's sad trajectory comprises the only real dramatic movement in the novel.

  At the outset, Louise’s unfathomable crime recalled for me the character of Meursault in Camus’ “The Stranger,” whose motivation for murdering another man remains somewhat mysterious. Slimani seems eager to lead us down this path, invoking the same existentialist leanings that many associated with Camus’ novel. For instance, she seems to be channeling Sartre when she writes of Myriam’s feelings: “We will, all of us, only be happy, she thinks, when we don’t need one another anymore. When we can lie a life of our own, a life that belongs to us, that has nothing to do with anyone else. When we are free.” Also, it’s probably no accident that Slimani’s opening line echoes that of “The Stranger”: “Mamam died today.”

  Yet Slimani tracks in the opposite direction as Camus, not casting his protagonist as detached and unknowable, but instead peeling away the layers of Louise’s psyche. Three-fourth's the way into the novel, the nanny’s breakdown becomes physical, and the mental aspects begin piling up page by page, as she starts hearing voices and grows emotionally cold enough to eventually commit murder. “Her heart has grown hard. The years have covered it in a thick, cold rind, and she can barely hear it beating. Nothing moves her anymore.”

  Bukowski’s shoelace, for Louise, is when her plan fails to entice Paul and Myriam to have a third child. It’s clear that in the aging of the couple’s children the nanny unmistakably sees the family’s reliance on her dissipating, robbing her of her capital and her life’s meaning. She stops this sad cycle the only way she knows how. We, the readers, understand Louise, and recognize in our own lives that dividing line of sanity, of which we must stay on the right side of.

  Slimani gives us much to think about along the way; issues that are present today in society: immigration, class, women in the workplace, motherhood, the dark side of capitalism and the ways it turns parents into nervous workaholics and casts others into underappreciated servitude. In an interview in The New Yorker, Slimani comes across as an artist doomed to find the dark side in everything — sex (as in her first novel, “In the Ogre’s Garden”), parenting and even writing itself. But that doom may be her great gift: In exploring it, she finds her métier. She wants to look deep into the shadows without flinching, knowing that only this will free us from our fears. Or, at the very least, allow us to live with them.

  John Winters Cognoscenti contributor
  John Winters is a Massachusetts native who works and teaches at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of the new biography, "Sam Shepard: A Life." He can be reached via johnjwinters.com.

  More…

• The Scotsman
  https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-lullaby-by-leila-slimani-1-4671308
  Word count: 924

  Book review: Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani Journalist and author Leila Slimani PIC: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP / Getty Images Journalist and author Leila Slimani PIC: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP / Getty Images Stuart Kelly Published: 18:25 Wednesday 24 January 2018 Share this article Get Daily Updates To Your Inbox 0 Have your say This is a remarkable novel, for which Leïla Slimani won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Man Booker Prize. It is dark, ambiguous, disturbing and arresting. Parts of it reminded me of Muriel Spark or Patricia Highsmith in its askance morality; at the same time it has the precision, the slight surrealism deployed to highlight reality and the questions about women, bodies and feminism that typify other French language writers, such as Marie Darrieussecq or Amélie Nothomb. The English language version of Chanson Douce – translated by Sam Taylor – is strikingly different to the French editions in that the cover is emblazoned with a “grab-line”: “The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds.” There are a few points where translation is difficult. You can’t really translate Monoprix, or include a footnote about the social difference between tu and vous – though in a novel about class distinctions that seems a necessary territory. The novel begins with its ending, so there is no spoiler in this. Myriam is a French-Algerian lawyer who is returning to work after having had two children. Her husband, Paul, is a music producer. Both are reluctant to take on all the responsibilities of parenthood. Therefore they decide to employ a nanny – Louise – to take care of Mila and Adam. From the outset, the reader knows that something will go wrong: one child is dead, another injured and the nanny is in the bath with knife-wounds on her wrists. The question is, in some ways, is there a twist or is the twist that there is no twist? Louise seems to be the ideal candidate – the novel even references Mary Poppins – but it gets much darker than “Chim Chim Cheree”. Louise has a repertoire of bizarre and odd stories, about unicorns, ogres and princesses, but none of them from the canon, as it were. There are plenty of trails, false or otherwise. Why does little Mila bite people? Why does Paul absent himself as often as possible? Myriam is trying to be a good mother as well as a defender of people accused of crimes. And at the centre of it all is Louise, a woman who has been employed but at the same time has inveigled her way into the home, made herself indispensable to the vaguely glamorous couple. Being the nanny does not always mean cleaning the sheets and cooking for the dinner parties. A question at the heart of this elegantly nasty novel is: what happens when they grow up? Of course, the ancestor to all this is The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James, another novella about a governess, a male and female child, and a double version of what toxic masculinity and femininity might be. But where James invokes the supernatural, Slimani focuses on the tragically banal. Her depictions of the constrained circumstances of Louise are striking in their ordinariness. However much her employers might plead their plight, she is the one going back to a one-room apartment. Much is made of her “varnished” nails and purple eye-shadow. It seems this is a metaphor for her whole character. As long as you can conceal yourself, there is no need to reveal yourself. Louise is a very strange character to describe. In fact the book eschews giving the reader directions about who she is. How old is she, with her blonde and greying hair? Is her fling with an old man indicative of desperation or abuse? Each time she comes into focus, she also elides, or slides, into a kind of absence. Even the descriptions of her clothes – her “Peter Pan” collar dress is frequently mentioned – mean that she is a costume more than a person. Nobody seems to notice she wears the same thing every day. While it is made clear that Myriam is of a mixed background, and although we are told about the pale hands of Louise, it is never totally clear how one might envision Louise. The narrative cleverly interpolates some of the stories of others, including Louise’s ex-husband, her landlord, her daughter, and the nosy next door neighbour who thinks she knows more than she knows. Actors Who Didn’t Want To Kiss Their Co-Stars Read More Hooch The book has a remarkable fluency with tense: given it begins at the end, it shuffles between future tense, past tense, past continuous and present (kudos to the translator). It is almost fidgety about time, and that makes it all the more horrific when time stands still. This clever, eerie novel will leave some readers reeling. Who did commit an act of unspeakable horror? Who is the real victim? That it leaves the reader on a suspended chord is why it is a worthy winner of the Prix Goncourt. That it uses the conventions of the crime novel to analyse exclusion, mobility, poverty and privilege is admirable; that it does so while still being subtle and sophisticated is more than admirable. Hopefully, the success of this novel will make Leïla Slimani a better known name, and her previous works can be made available to an Anglophone audience. Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani, Faber & Faber, £12.99

  Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-lullaby-by-leila-slimani-1-4671308

• The Economist
  https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21734376-le-la-slimanis-sophomore-novel-chilling-domestic-thriller-perfect-nanny-exploits
  Word count: 560

  “The Perfect Nanny” exploits working mothers’ fears

  Leïla Slimani’s sophomore novel is a chilling domestic thriller
  Print edition | Books and arts
  Jan 11th 2018

  The Perfect Nanny. By Leïla Slimani. Translated by Sam Taylor. Penguin; 240 pages; $16. Published in Britain as “Lullaby”. Faber and Faber; £12.99.

  LEÏLA SLIMANI is a young Moroccan-born journalist based in Paris. Her first novel, about a woman who becomes addicted to sex as relief from her stifling bourgeois life, was compared to “Anna Karenina” and “Madame Bovary”. Her second won the Goncourt prize in 2016. This month it comes out in English.
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  Like her first work, inspired by the sex scandal that felled Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French political grandee, “The Perfect Nanny” is also based on a true story, about a nanny who murders her small charges. Myriam Massé is a promising young lawyer who embraces motherhood but finds domesticity suffocating. Her husband, Paul, does not want his children brought up by immigrants. “Not too old, no veils and no smokers.” The family lives in a handsome building in the tenth arrondissement in Paris, “where neighbours offer friendly greetings, even if they don’t know each other”. Theirs is the smallest flat, though; they have to build a dividing wall in the living room when their second child is born.

  The nanny they hire is Louise, who sets about lightening the atmosphere of the Massés’ home with all the preternatural sweetness of a supermarket air-freshener. She tirelessly repeats the children’s favourite games, rearranges the apartment, cooks up a storm and even does the mending that Myriam has been endlessly putting off.

  The novel opens with the crime, so its readability (helped by Sam Taylor’s cool translation) comes from the back story: the transformation of Louise from good fairy to madwoman in the attic. The plot details are laid on ever more thickly. Louise’s husband, it turns out, died after a long illness, leaving her huge debts. Their only child has run away. She turns out to be more than a little needy. A slim page-turner, “The Perfect Nanny” can be read in a single, shivery sitting. It satisfies every middle-class nightmare about the guilty relief of entrusting your screaming toddlers to other people’s care. It will make a great film. Great literature it isn’t.
  This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The baby and the blade"
  Print edition | Books and arts

• Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/01/25/every-working-mom-worst-nightmare/eaWypVB7ZQbFJfJPi5Eu1H/story.html
  Word count: 974

  Every working mom’s worst nightmare
  By John Freeman Globe Correspondent January 26, 2018
  Circa 1948: A baby-sitter keeps a watchful eye on a sleeping child.
  Three Lions/Getty Images
  Circa 1948: A baby-sitter keeps a watchful eye on a sleeping child.

  Monstrous crimes are often, by definition, inexplicable.

  In our quest for meaning, though, narratives of such events are not always just pornoviolence, as Tom Wolfe once labeled Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” noting that the point of that tale was the unveiling of the gory details themselves. Stories, the best of them, produce morality by provoking our response.

  Leila Slimani performs an admirable reversal then in her English language debut, “The Perfect Nanny,” winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt. Unlike Capote, Slimani’s story of a seemingly ideal caretaker opens with its bloody conclusion: the stabbing murder of two children by their nanny, every working mother’s worst nightmare. It is a fiction inspired by the real-life killing of two New York children by their Dominican nanny.

  As Slimani’s book opens, the family’s apartment has been turned into a crime scene; one child is being zipped into a gray bag, the other about to die on the way to the hospital of head wounds.
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  The nanny has admitted guilt by stabbing herself in the neck.

  So we begin “The Perfect Nanny” in horror, and then miraculously, swiftly, Slimani creates a person out of that powerful spectacle. In this fashion the novel functions like an extended Maupassant story turned inside out.

  The hints of France’s greatest short-story writer emerge in the first pages. Myriam and Paul, the parents of the children, are successful professionals with busy schedules. Slimani tells us they live in “a handsome apartment building on Rue d’Hauteville, in Paris’s tenth arrondissement. A building where neighbors offer friendly greetings, even if they don’t know each other.”

  Theirs is one of the smaller apartments in the building, and this financial pressure lures Myriam back to work, just as it leads Louise, the nanny, to come work for her. Louise has lost a child to her life’s disarray; Myriam hires a nanny to escape hers.

  Slimani is an astute observer of power politics in the home, how it can produce volatile allegiances. Paul, Myriam’s husband, fights her until all he can do is slip doubts under her mind’s rug. “If you think it’ll make you happy,” he says, noting a nanny will essentially cost her entire salary.

  As soon as Louise arrives, she takes charge of the house, and Paul looks on Myriam and Louise as a kind of tribe.

  Some novelists write with images. Slimani builds her story in moments like this, tiny ruptures captured in paragraph-long scenes that come together like a portrait etched in shards of glass.

  On Louise’s first day of work, she arrives early not having slept much. She lingers in the stairwell, not wanting to appear too eager, already making herself invisible.

  “She decides to ring the doorbell in a quarter of an hour, and in the meantime she waits on a step between two floors. She hears a noise and barely has time to get to her feet: it’s Paul, hurtling downstairs. He’s carrying his bike and wearing a pink helmet.”

  So much is there in the pink bicycle helmet. Paul is an entitled and slightly childish man so absorbed in appearing cool as he cycles to work that he views the woman he has employed to watch his children as almost an afterthought.

  “Louise? Have you been here long? Why didn’t you come in?”

  A scant few pages after this book’s horrific opening, Slimani has produced a spark of empathy for Louise. In the ensuing chapters she does it again and again.

  She likewise connects us to the family. Paul feels he has wasted his youth; the children are at once feral and loving; Myriam hates herself for outsourcing love but refuses to give up her freedom.

  Narrating from a dazzling array of viewpoints, Slimani produces an ever-turning love triangle of possession and resentment. Paul and Louise share a carefree moment, excluding Myriam. Later, the two of them leave Louise at their door as they go to make love. The children shower affection on Louise, often, Myriam suspects, as revenge. Alone with the nanny, though, they can be vengeful. One of them bites on her on the shoulder.

  As the book circles ineluctably to its starting point, such incidents compound. Paul and Myriam hide their purchases from Louise as well as their habit of throwing out food. In return, Myriam, whose poverty is powerfully evoked, returns a chicken carcass from the trash and puts it on the table.

  Eventually, as we go back into Louise’s head it becomes clear something has gone awry. Here the novel begins to erase the sympathy it so vividly won back. The result is a book that provokes horror only to slide it aside and challenge us to forget it. Typically the addition of empathy — rather than its subtraction — feels more like life.

  THE PERFECT NANNY

  By Leila Slimani

  Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

  Penguin, 240 pp., paperback, $16

  John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s and author of “Maps,’’ a collection of poems. https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/01/25/every-working-mom-worst-nightmare/eaWypVB7ZQbFJfJPi5Eu1H/story.html

• Marie Claire
  http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/entertainment/lullaby-by-leila-slimani-538837
  Word count: 804

  This book about a killer nanny is tipped as 2018’s Gone Girl
  Lullaby by Leila Slimani

  Lullaby by Leila Slimani
  Lucy Pavia
  By
  Lucy Pavia
  January 18, 2018 5:54 pm

  'The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds'

  You’d be hard-pressed to find a darker subject matter for a novel than that of Lullaby by Leila Slimani. Following the story of a murderous nanny, the novel has already kicked up a storm of controversy and debate in France under its original name Chanson Douce, selling over 100,000 copies in its first week alone.

  Now a fierce bidding war for the rights has brought the translation of the book out in the UK and 19 other countries around the world.

  So what’s all the fuss about? The book sets out to shock from the very first sentence, opening with a scene that taps into every parent’s worst nightmare, when a mother comes home from work to find her two young children have been murdered by their nanny.

  After this gruesome first chapter, Lullaby by Leila Slimani jumps back to the year before, when middle class Parisian couple Myriam (a lawyer) and husband Paul (a music producer) employ Louise to look after their two young children. The experienced 40-year-old nanny comes with impeccable credentials and glowing references, the children instantly take to her and after a week Paul and Myriam are boasting to their friends that they’ve found the ‘perfect’ childminder.

  But of course things are not what they seem, though we’ll leave you to find out exactly why.

  The book is tightly written, but besides the nightmarish premise, in its 200 pages Slimani also cleverly drills down into the parent-nanny dynamic, one so often loaded with judgement and guilt, particularly for women.

  Before Louise’s arrival we see the book’s heroine Myriam oscillate between intense love for her children and frustration at the loss of identity motherhood often entails, a feeling many readers with children (Slimani herself has a five-year-old son) will identify with. ‘Maybe we can only really be happy’ Myriam thinks, ‘when we don’t need one another. When we have a life that belongs to us.’

  Lullaby by Leila Slimani

  Leila Slimani, the author of Lullaby: ‘I’m getting stuck into two huge taboos, child murder and the place of the mother today, so I expected a reaction’

  There are also points later in the book when the couple seem to take advantage of Louise’s seemingly boundless work ethic, like taking her on holiday to Greece with them ostensibly as a ‘treat’, only to leave her minding the children all day.

  ‘The subject came from the fact that I myself had nannies growing up in Morocco,’ said French-Moroccan Slimani at a press conference after winning the prestigious Prix Goncord award for the novel (the French equivalent of the Booker) ‘at 7 or 8, I was already very sensitive to the very strange position they had in the house; they were both women we loved as mothers, and strangers. I was always touched by their difficult position, sometimes by the humiliations they might go through.’

  Lullaby by Leila Slimani

  Lullaby by Leila Slimani will be published by Faber in January 2018

  The devastating opening scene of the book is strikingly similar to the case of Manhattan nanny Yoselyn Ortega, who murdered two children under her watch – Lucia and Leo Krim – before attempting suicide by stabbing herself in the neck, though Slimani told The Telegraph the plot of Lullaby is entirely fictional.
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  She also said she was prepared for a potential backlash. ‘In terms of any controversy, I’m getting stuck into two huge taboos: child murder and the place of the mother today, so I expected a reaction,’ says Slimani. ‘Because the mother I write about is a woman who doesn’t want to be stuck at home, wants to work and sees the nanny as someone who can free her from her role as a mother. And that is something so many women feel but won’t admit. Because there’s still this idea that women are ‘abandoning’ their children when they go off to work. And yet nobody thinks that of men.’

• The Millions
  https://themillions.com/2018/02/leila-slimanis-the-perfect-nanny.html
  Word count: 874

  The Outcome of Leila Slimani’s ‘The Perfect Nanny’ Can Only Be Disastrous
  Reviews
  Mark Cecil February 9, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 3 min read
  Related Books:

  Reviews of award-winning, international sensation The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani have made much of the first line, “The baby is dead.” The first three pages pull no punches. There are graphic descriptions of two dead children in a Paris apartment, murdered by a nanny. A baby’s little body gets hauled off in a grey bag, zipped shut. The mother howls like a “she-wolf.”

  Shocking as this is, the real clue to what the book is about occurs a few pages earlier than the first line. It’s in the epigraph, taken from Fyodor Dostoevsky:

  ‘Do you understand, dear sir, do you understand what it means when you have nowhere to go?’ Marmeladov’s question of the previous day came suddenly into his mind. ‘For every man must have somewhere to go.’

  This, in a nutshell, is what Slimani is exploring. The fate of a trapped, ignored, abandoned person, a woman with nowhere to go, who in this case is driven to an unthinkable crime. Slimani’s project is one of psychological forensics—what drove her to it? The Dostoevsky quote provides part of the answer.

  After showing us the dead children, Slimani takes the reader back in time. A few pages later, we find them alive again, and happily playing with their parents, a typical upper-middle class, married, Parisian couple named Paul and Myriam. They live in a handsome apartment with Japanese prints on the wall. He’s a music producer, she’s a lawyer. Post-childbirth, she’s feeling dumpy — feels that she’s losing her looks, squandering her education on mere motherhood. Paul wants to be in the studio all the time. They squabble. When she says she wants to resume her career in law, he says, “I didn’t know you wanted to work.” She responds by calling him an “egotist.” Like so many other doomed couples in art, Paul and Myriam thought they could have it all. At first, they didn’t even want babysitters. Soon enough, life will be impossible without the help.

  Enter Louise. She is petite, blonde. Lots of makeup. Not a hair out of place. She does everything perfectly well. Cooks, cleans, the kids love her. She’s discreet. Paul doesn’t even think of her as a “real” woman, but rather, part of the world of children or employees.

  There’s hints of darkness. Louise has surprising strength for someone so small. “Her face was like a peaceful sea. Its depths suspected by no one.” There’s a bite scar on Louise’s shoulder. She watches gruesome true crime on TV. She tells creepy fairy tales. She knocks the daughter down by accident, towering over her. Then she puts makeup on her, making her look like a drag queen.

  Outside of work, Louise fits in nowhere, “like a character who ended up in the wrong story and is doomed to roam endlessly through a foreign world.” On the streets, she’s bumped into. Yelled at. Pushed around. She feels “invisible” on the movie set of humanity. She’s also deeply in debt. Her own daughter has gone off the rails in school. Her husband is dead. She feels like a “dog whose legs are broken by small children.”

  The book proceeds through vignettes, as Myriam and Paul continue to do all the bourgeois things you’d expect. They go on vacation. They have dinner parties. They have sex. Louise overhears. The scenes of bourgeois life can be a bit slow, but the book picks up intensity when we start to hear from different witnesses to the crime, layered throughout. People wondering if they should have done anything to prevent it. A neighbor looking back at an elevator ride he shared with the murderer. The police putting together the clues. Everyone asking, who was this woman?

  As Louise gets closer to the snapping point, Slimani sprinkles in a few choice creepy moments. A rotting chicken carcass appears on the kitchen table—a perfect jump-out-of-your-seat moment. Paul, the husband, gently mocks his wife for being worried about the nanny, saying “it’s like the script of a bad horror film.” Whenever a character makes light of the horror, you know something awful is afoot.

  In some ways, the book is a classic, even Dostoevskian, tale of one person’s descent into madness. But the true structure of The Perfect’s Nanny seems to be more of a love-triangle. Both the parents and Louise are in love with the children, but only one can possess them in the end. Louise plays the part of the spurned mistress. The outcome can only be disastrous.
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  Mark Cecil is a novelist based in Boston. A former reporter and editor for Reuters in New York City and San Francisco, he is represented by Westwood Creative Artists in Toronto. You can find more about him at markcecilauthor.com.

• World Literature Today
  https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/imperfections-perfect-nanny-khalid-lyamlahy
  Word count: 1982

  Book Reviews
  On the Imperfections of the Perfect Nanny
  January 31, 2018
  by
  Khalid Lyamlahy
  A photo of author Leila Slimani juxtaposed with the cover of the American edition of her book, The Perfect Nanny
  Leïla Slimani / Photo courtesy of FrenchCulture.org

  I have barely read any critical pieces on Leïla Slimani’s novel Chanson douce (Gallimard, 2016), winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2016. The best-seller came out just this month in the UK and the US under two distinct titles: Lullaby (Faber, 2018) for the British edition and The Perfect Nanny (Penguin, 2018) for the American one. Inspired by a true story set in New York, the novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies in France in its first year of publication and has already been translated into several languages. This wide commercial success, however, seems to have totally occluded some of the most problematic aspects of the best-seller. One question I have kept on asking myself is why some of the ambiguities and imperfections of the novel have gone unnoticed, if not ignored, by readers and literary critics alike?

  One questionable aspect of Slimani’s novel is her tendentious treatment of immigrants and strangers. Paradoxically, the blurb description of the novel mentions the word “race” alongside “power,” “class,” “gender,” and “domesticity” as topics that are “bravely observed” by the author. Even more surprisingly, most reviewers have celebrated the way in which the novel departs from immigration issues and instead offers a broader “post-identitarian” reflection on class and social struggle in contemporary France. Thus, Jennifer Howell writes in the Journal of North African Studies that “while Slimani is of Moroccan origin, neither she nor her publishers have capitalized on her ethnicity,” adding that her treatment of domestic labor in France reflects “a social reality and does not represent an open treatise on immigration.” Similarly, in a no less celebratory review in the New Yorker, American journalist and author Lauren Collins explains that Slimani’s reticence to engage with news in France is also “a pushback against the notion that the Moroccan or the Afghan writer must grapple with political issues while the American or the French one is left to explore the questions of an individual life.”

  Slimani, while trying to evade political issues in her exploration of the relationship between a Parisian bourgeois family and their nanny, ends up grappling with politics in an ambiguous if not biased way.

  Unlike these hasty statements, it is my contention that Slimani, while trying to evade political issues in her exploration of the relationship between a Parisian bourgeois family and their nanny, ends up grappling with politics in an ambiguous if not biased way. The novel recounts how Louise, the babysitter, comes to kill Adam and Mila, the two young children of Paul Massé, a French music producer, and Myriam Charfa, a lawyer of Maghrebi origin. The narrative opens with the death of the children and goes on to reconstruct the relationship between the babysitter and her employees, inviting the reader to reflect on the potential factors that have led her to commit the crime. Despite this highly original and efficient structure, however, throughout the novel Slimani inexplicably reproduces a series of cheap clichés and narrow representations of strangers.

  During their interviewing of candidates for the position of babysitter, Paul and Myriam seem to recycle some of the widespread misrepresentations of difference in contemporary French society. “Not too old, no veils, no smokers,” Paul says to his wife. From the outset, the veil is flagged as a threatening sign that reactivates the heated debates on its status in the French public scene. The figure of the foreign candidate is reduced to the exclusive requirement of being not only available for the job but also discreet if not submissive. As a result, an English-speaking Philippine, an undocumented Ivorian, and a Moroccan with twenty years of babysitting experience are all turned down by the couple for no obvious reason.

  One could argue that Slimani is precisely denouncing the treatment of immigrants in France, but her representations remain consistently hazy and double-edged. Malika, the Moroccan candidate, for instance, is laconically described as “a Moroccan woman of a certain age” whom Myriam rejects for fearing “that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny” and that “the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic . . . asking her all sorts of favors in the name of their shared language and religion.” Slimani, whom Emmanuel Macron recently appointed as his personal representative for francophone affairs, seems to fuel a negative image of North Africans as a divided community with entrenched attitudes toward language and religion. By the same token, she denies them a well-known sense of solidarity in French exile and sees their division as a matter of fact embedded in social structures.

  This problematic aspect becomes more prominent with Slimani’s treatment of Wafa, Louise’s friend and confidante, whom Lauren Collins refers to in passing as only “another nanny.” Conversely, I would argue that Wafa is a key character of the novel as she embodies the reflected image of Slimani’s ambiguous and demeaning representations of the immigrant. The Moroccan nanny Wafa is compared to “a big cat, not too subtle but very resourceful.” She arrived in France “thanks to an old man to whom she used to give massages in a seedy hotel in Casablanca” and to whom she “offered” her body “following both her instinct and her mother’s advice.” Not only is the vibrant city of Casablanca strangely reduced to the image of “a seedy hotel,” but the idea that prostitution is somehow embedded in the collective unconscious and mediated from one generation to another is a typical illustration of Slimani’s problematic discourse.

  Wafa’s chaotic trajectory culminates in her imagining that Alphonse, the child she’s looking after, becomes an adult, travels to Morocco, and stays in the same hotel where she used to work, to be eventually “serviced by one of her sisters or her cousins.” The abuse of the Moroccan body is doomed to repeat itself, turning domination into a mere banality reproduced across generations with no possible way out. This is even more surprising giving Slimani’s feminist commitment and recent publication of a nonfictional book about sexuality in Morocco.

  Slimani, whom Emmanuel Macron recently appointed as his personal representative for francophone affairs, seems to fuel a negative image of North Africans as a divided community with entrenched attitudes toward language and religion.

  Throughout The Perfect Nanny, Slimani’s problematic discourse about the self and the other proves to be more than just an imperfection. It recklessly reinforces the idea that strangers are condemned to submission and exclusion. A relevant example here is provided by the evocative sequence when Louise watches Wafa cooking for her: the French nanny gains temporary access to the status of the bourgeois housewife while her Moroccan colleague remains hopelessly trapped in her social condition. Slimani writes that Wafa “has always admired Louise’s manners, her prim politeness, which could pass for that of a real bourgeois lady.” Their friendship is in fact based on an implicit display of domination and submission reinforced in the narrative. Wafa is the nanny of the nanny, the “other” nanny whose existence and aspirations are defined and driven only by Louise’s destiny.

  Another striking example is the “old North African man” who helps Louise carrying the stroller in the stairs of the Paris metro and then inexplicably starts following her and asking intrusive questions. In a gratuitous move, Slimani shifts his image from helpful and polite to badly mannered and indiscreet. For what reason?

  Slimani’s novel needs to be read beyond Louise’s sensational crime as a typical case of ambiguity when it comes to depicting strangers and immigrants in commercial fiction. Lydie, the Ivorian leader of the nannies who regularly gather at the park, is introduced as “the self-proclaimed president” who “wears fake-fur coats and has thin red-pencil eyebrows.” The cliché of African nondemocracy is combined here with notions of falsification and deception. When Lydie offers Louise another job, Louise ignores her and reacts in a violent and aggressive way. This unwarranted violence against the foreign body remains indecipherable: does it denounce the hatred of difference or rather reproduce the patterns and behaviors that obliquely and perhaps unconsciously sustain such hatred?

  “Post-identitarian” writing does not necessitate the distortion of difference nor the reproduction of cheap and demeaning clichés: it rather requires a much deeper effort to reveal how identity and difference become intermingled in the space of social struggle.

  Lauren Collins reports that Slimani “originally conceived of Louise’s character as an African woman but decided to make her ‘a white woman doing an immigrant’s job, which is extremely demeaning’ in order to emphasize her marginality.” Slimani’s constructions are based not only on social separation but also on a strategic racial hierarchy that consequently emphasizes the downgrading of the immigrant.

  Slimani and I were both born and raised in Morocco, and we were both educated at French schools, but we certainly don’t share the same view on the role of fiction in negotiating the question of identity and difference in the age of migration and displacement. The Perfect Nanny is a novel that indirectly contributes to the dynamics of exclusion and differentiation: the stranger is the marginalized character of the main narrative, the forgotten subject of distorted representations. If the novel will be widely read as crime fiction or psychological thriller, it still tackles the politics of identity and difference in a reductive, poorly creative, and sometimes unnecessarily violent or ambiguous way.

  According to Collins, Slimani responded to an interviewer who asked her why she hadn’t published an autobiographical first novel: “Because I’m North African, and I didn’t want to identify myself uniquely with that. I told myself: You’re going to weave a web in which you’re going to imprison yourself, when you have in front of you a much larger horizon.” By looking away from the complexity of being both French and North African, Slimani seems uninterested in exploring the condition of immigrants, except in a series of scattered and prejudiced statements. “Post-identitarian” writing does not necessitate the distortion of difference nor the reproduction of cheap and demeaning clichés: it rather requires a much deeper effort to reveal how identity and difference become intermingled in the space of social struggle.

  I remember that shortly after winning the Goncourt Prize, Slimani declared that Morocco was governed by “medieval laws.” This radical and unbalanced statement reminded me of what Edward Said wrote in 2003, a few months before his death: “The only ‘good’ Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and society without reservation.” Slimani’s statement was as much unjustified as unfair. Morocco is not perfect, but the country certainly needs more responsible and engaged contributions from its diaspora. I have always thought that it is much harder to think positively about one’s people and culture: to flag issues and work to deconstruct them, but also to acknowledge successes and build on them.

  On the question of identity and difference, Slimani should turn to Abdelkebir Khatibi, probably one of the most productive Moroccan intellectuals, far less celebrated in France. In the conclusion of a book he dedicated in 1987 to figures of the stranger in French literature, Khatibi redefines writing as “an exercise of cosmopolitan alterity.” This is precisely what is lacking in Slimani’s novel: a responsible sense of alterity open to the complex dynamics of being and being-in-the-world.

  University of Oxford

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579673595/the-perfect-nanny-is-the-working-mothers-murderous-nightmare
  Word count: 803

  'The Perfect Nanny' Is The Working Mother's Murderous Nightmare
  7:34

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  January 22, 201812:31 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air

  Maureen Corrigan

  Fresh Air
  The Perfect Nanny, by Leila Slimani
  Eslah Attar/NPR

  If you've seen the 1945 film noir Mildred Pierce or the 2011 HBO miniseries of the same name (both made from James M. Cain's novel), you know that story punishes Mildred for being a working mother: Her marriage breaks up, her younger daughter takes ill and dies and her elder daughter ,Vida, turns out to be a murderer — all because Mildred wasn't in the home 24/7 to oversee things.

  I feel about Mildred Pierce the same way I now feel about The Perfect Nanny, by Leila Slimani. I recognize that it's good art and I hate how it guilt-trips working mothers. The last thing working mothers need to be reading in their nanosecond of downtime is this psychological suspense novel about a "perfect" nanny who snaps. But, of course, they're exactly the audience who will be most drawn to it.
  The Perfect Nanny

  by Leila Slimani

  Paperback, 228 pages
  purchase

  Slimani's novel, which has just been translated from the French, is inspired by a real life horror: the 2012 murder of two children in New York City by their nanny.

  In Slimani's hands, the unthinkable becomes art: The Perfect Nanny won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, when it was published there in 2016. Slimani is the first Moroccan-born woman to be so honored.

  One can see why the judges were wowed. The voice of Slimani's omniscient narrator is chill and precise; her plot spares neither her characters' fates nor her readers' sensibilities. The opening paragraph of The Perfect Nanny warns us this is a story in which the worst can happen and, in fact, just has:

  The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. The doctor said he didn't suffer. ... The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. ... On the way to the hospital she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions. ... Her lungs had been punctured ...

  When 2 Children Are Murdered, 'The Perfect Nanny' Is Anything But
  The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books
  When 2 Children Are Murdered, 'The Perfect Nanny' Is Anything But

  As in the true story on which it is based, the broken bodies of the two children are found by their mother. (Indeed, the dad in this novel barely registers.) The mom here is named Myriam, and she's a lawyer, happy to be working again after a stint of being cooped up with her very young children. The nanny, Louise, is the central enigma of Slimani's novel — a human black hole who relentlessly sucks in and extinguishes the light in the family's life.

  After its grisly opening, The Perfect Nanny flashes back to Louise's entrance into the family. Myriam, who (like Slimani herself) is Moroccan-French and has confronted racism in Paris, refuses to hire any North Africans. We're told:

  [Myriam] fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic. Telling Myriam her life story and, soon, asking her all sorts of favors in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity.

  The couple interviews a parade of unsuitable women before the bird-like, middle-aged Louise walks in, perfectly perfect in every way. In a few short weeks, Louise takes charge, not only of the two children, but also of their needy parents.

  Slimani's aloof narrator slowly reveals that Louise obsessively yearns for a second chance to perfect her own flawed mothering skills. Of course, it's an impossible aim and the pressure mounts. Every evening, Louise returns to a miserable rented room, which she regards as a mere "lair, a parenthesis where she comes to hide her exhaustion."

  Poetic phrases like that one abound throughout Slimani's novel and elevate it well above its formulaic premise, one that has inspired many a beware-the-au-pair Lifetime movie.

  But, the irony is that for all its exquisite craft, the takeaway of The Perfect Nanny is pretty much the same as the message of those movies, as well as of that 1992 cinematic cultural touchstone The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, as well as of Mildred Pierce. Namely: Stay home, Mom.

  Surely it's the enduring masochistic power of that nightmare of maternal inadequacy — rendered particularly vivid here through Slimani's stylistic gifts — that have made this slim novel an international bestseller. Talk about a guilty pleasure.

• The Economist- 1843
  https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/the-daily/all-you-need-to-know-about-lullabythe-perfect-nanny-by-lela-slimani
  Word count: 1647

  All you need to know about... Lullaby/The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani
  Anna Baddeley | January 15th 2018

  Leïla Slimani’s novel about a killer nanny was a hit in France, and has just been published in Britain and America

  Why do I need to know about this book?

  “The Perfect Nanny” (its American title) or “Lullaby” (its British title) is one of the most hyped books of 2018. Based on a real-life case of a nanny who killed the children she was looking after, it’s billed as a literary thriller with a layer of social commentary – the kind of book that publishers and journalists get really excited about. The dustjacket features a quotation from a British newspaper calling it the “next ‘Gone Girl’”, a reference to the novel by Gillian Flynn that sold 15 million copies and was turned into a Hollwood movie. It was originally published a couple of years ago in France (as “Chanson douce”, which means lullaby), where it won the Prix Goncourt, a very prestigious book prize.

  I’ve never heard of Leïla Slimani. Who is she?

  The other reason that publishers and journalists are wild about this book is because its author is super bright, exceedingly glamorous and apparently not afraid of publicity. She was born to a well-off family in Morocco in 1981, and moved to Paris to go to university when she was 17. She worked as an actress, then as a journalist, covering Morocco and Tunisia for a weekly magazine. She had a baby with her husband Antoine, a banker, and stuck with the job for a while, but after being arrested while reporting in Tunisia she quit and decided to focus on writing novels.

  “Chanson douce”, her second published novel, achieved that rare feat of being adored by the public as much as the critics. Winning the Goncourt turned her into a celebrity in France and Morocco. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who has a nose for PR, hired her to be his (unpaid) Francophone affairs minister to promote French language and culture “to a multicultural world”.

  Despite being “born a Muslim” and growing up in a Muslim country, Slimani is stridently secular, in the Frenchest way possible. At the time of writing, she is trending on Twitter for having written a column in Libération, a French newspaper, defending her right to walk down the street in a miniskirt with her cleavage on show and not feel afraid, and contrasting that to women who “hide” themselves in long black veils. As a recent New Yorker profile of Slimani mentioned, her forthrightness has made some people uneasy. It quoted Francois Soudan, a liberal journalist, who said, “to be bankable in the media right now on the Left Bank of the Seine, the good Arab is obliged to be secular, Islamophobic, preferably libertine, and, if possible, under threat (for the preceding) in his country of origin.” Slimani, for her part, insists that “you have to defend your ideas – you can’t always cede the floor to others.”

  Give me a brief idea of the plot.

  We learn in the first few sentences that a nanny has killed two children. The rest of the book is about the lead-up to this horrific event.

  Myriam and Paul are an upper-middle-class couple living in a posh part of Paris, who are squeezed into a small apartment with their two children. Myriam is bored with being a stay-at-home mum and decides to resume her career as a criminal lawyer. Paul works in the music business. They get a nanny – Louise – who seems perfect, but then starts to do increasingly weird things, like putting make-up on their daughter, or fishing a chicken carcass out of the bin and encouraging the children to pick at it.

  The book is told in the third person from multiple view points, and we see what Myriam and Paul can’t – that Louise’s mental health is disintegrating and that she is living at the mercy of a slum landlord. Flashbacks tell us more about Louise’s tough life, which includes an abusive husband and a dysfunctional daughter, who she wasn’t able to look after properly because she was spending so much time bringing up other people’s kids.

  There are also, through Louise’s friend Wafa, enlightening excursions into the world of Paris’s immigrant nannies.

  There’s something about the killer-nanny set-up that sounds familiar.

  Slimani has said she was inspired by a news story about the murders of Leo and Lucia Krim, a two- and six-year-old from New York who were stabbed to death in 2012. The children’s nanny was charged with the murders, but is yet to stand trial. “Lullaby” shares not-very-subtle similarities with the case – right down to the children’s mother walking in on the bloody crime scene. Not content to borrow from one news story, Slimani told the New Yorker that she named her killer nanny Louise after Louise Woodward, the British au pair who was accused of shaking a baby to death in 1997. Given that Woodward was convicted of involuntary manslaughter rather than murder, Slimani is sailing close to the wind here.

  What’s her style of writing like?

  “The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds. The doctor said he didn’t suffer.” “Lullaby”’s opening will give you a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. The reader is propelled through the book by its short, matter-of-fact sentences, pausing only to admire an astute observation or a lyrical turn of phrase (or, occasionally, to despair at an excess of similes). Slimani has been slightly let down by her editors – there are infelicities in the translation that should have been picked up by a copy editor (for instance, Paul and Myriam’s daughter learns to tidy up “behind herself” instead of “after herself”). The dialogue is a little tin-eared, but then it is in so much translated fiction.

  However, this is the kind of book where the prose is secondary to its ideas.

  What sorts of themes does the novel explore?

  Where to start! This book has it all. Top of the bill is the timeless “career v motherhood” conundrum (it is refreshing to see a mother who loves her job as much as her children, even though she does get punished for it in the end – more on that later). Men are not shown in a good light: the middle-class father doesn’t want his wife to go back to work and implies her concerns about the nanny are hysterical; the working-class father (Louise’s husband) is a feckless, abusive alcoholic. Slimani has fun skewering the pretensions, hypocrisy and casual racism of “bobo” (bourgeois-bohemian) Parisians. When middle-class parents socialise together, “they talk about their jobs, about terrorism and property prices.” They make excuses for why they’re sending their children to private school instead of the local state school: “It’s a sad thing to say, but Odin would have been the only white kid in his class...I don’t think I’d handle it well if he came back to the house talking about God and speaking Arabic.”

  Has it been well reviewed?

  Mostly, yes. The reviewer for the Guardian called it a “political novel about emotional work”, while the Financial Times’s critic noted that “in its anarchism and episodic hysteria it is redolent of Zola’s ‘Thérèse Raquin’, or Genet’s ‘The Maids’”. One dissenting voice was Maureen Corrigan, from the Washington Post, who wrote:

  “Poetic phrases...abound throughout the novel and elevate it well above its formulaic premise, one that has inspired many a Lifetime television movie. But, the irony is that for all its fine language, the takeaway of ‘The Perfect Nanny’ is pretty much the same as the feminist backlash message of those movies, as well as that of 1992 cinematic cultural touchstone, ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’. Namely, there is no ‘perfect nanny’; indeed, the nanny who’s tending to your children may well be a psycho. Is any career worth that risk, ladies?”

  Any other talking points I need to know about?

  Slimani has been accused of “cashing in” on the murders of the Krim children. How soon is too soon to write a novel based on a real-life tragedy? Sure, novelists have always pilfered news stories (Thomas Hardy being the most famous example), but basing your plot on a notorious recent murder case risks upsetting the family and limiting the freedom of the novelist (you can’t be too snide about the parents). There’s also the somewhat dodgy matter of the case not having gone to trial yet.

  Another question sure to excite book groups is whether “Lullaby”/ “The Perfect Nanny” really is the next “Gone Girl”. Seeing as “Gone Girl” was all about the tight plotting and unexpected twists, while Slimani’s book starts with the “ending” before subtly probing a woman’s descent into psychosis, the publishers could be setting themselves up for a fall. Several reviewers on GoodReads and Amazon write about feeling short-changed by its “slow pace” and “unsatisfying” ending, although one Amazon customer wrote: “To be nothing like ‘Gone Girl’ is not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned – one of the most overrated, and bloated novels of that year.”

  Lullaby/The Perfect Nanny is out now, published by Faber (UK) and Penguin (US)

  Anna Baddeleyis digital editor of 1843

  Main photo: Catherine Hélie ©Editions Gallimard

  Keywords: Leila Slimani, Prix Goncourt, fiction, Books, France

• My San Antonio
  https://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/article/Book-review-Why-would-a-nanny-murder-the-12461869.php
  Word count: 810

  Book review: Why would a nanny murder the children she dotes on?

  By Rayyan Al-Shawaf, For the Express-News Updated 4:59 pm, Friday, January 19, 2018

  “The Perfect Nanny” by Leila Slimani Photo: Courtesy Photo

  Photo: Courtesy Photo
  Image 1 of 3
  “The Perfect Nanny” by Leila Slimani

  What might possess a nanny who dotes on the children in her care to murder them? When did the forces of darkness insinuate their way into her soul? And did she exhibit any outward signs of such a baleful transformation?

  These troubling questions must have exercised French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani as she went about writing a novel inspired by, though not based on, the notorious Krim children killings of New York City in 2012.

  Set in Paris, “The Perfect Nanny” opens with the title character having just viciously assaulted the two kids in her charge, and proceeds to take the reader through the months leading up to the ghastly (and fatal) deed.

  Awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize (the Prix Goncourt) in 2016, and now appearing in a fine translation by Sam Taylor, “The Perfect Nanny” is like a gelid hand slowly closing itself around your heart — but never giving it the dreaded squeeze.

  When, several months after the birth of her second child, Moroccan-born Myriam is offered a chance to resume a promising law career she had put on hiatus, she and her French husband Paul decide to hire a nanny.
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  Enter Louise: 40-something, beautiful, efficient, willing to both commute and work long hours, and so good with the couple’s young daughter Mila and infant son Adam that she “seems to have sprung straight from the pages of a book for children.”

  The fact that, thanks to the story’s structure, the reader knows of the hideous crime Louise will end up committing injects an element of suspense into her otherwise mundane brief: childcare and homemaking.

  Moreover, bit by bit, through a third-person narrator who inhabits Louise’s mind just as comfortably as that of Myriam or Paul, the creepy stuff seeps out. Slimani does not succeed entirely in bridging the gap between Louise as perfect nanny and Louise as crazed murderer, nor does she finger the decisive factor that triggers her paroxysm of violence. Yet, every indication, whether behavioral or purely psychological, of the woman’s demons goes some way toward bringing together her two warring halves.
  More Information

  The Perfect Nanny

  By Leila Slimani

  Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

  Penguin Books, $16

  Lonely Louise, whom flashbacks reveal to be a debt-ridden widow with an estranged adult daughter, is afflicted with bouts of melancholy and prone to angry outbursts.

  Separately, she demonstrates an uncanny ability, perhaps even an innate tendency, to enter wholly into Mila’s imaginative worlds, something Myriam finds a tad unsettling. “Perhaps, Myriam reassures herself, Louise is simply a child too.”

  Slimani also lays bare the nanny’s tussle with two centrifugal urges.

  On one hand, she fantasizes about retiring, alone, to a Greek island where she accompanies Myriam, Paul and the kids to provide her now-indispensable assistance during their vacation.

  “If I go there, it’s so I don’t have to look after anyone anymore,” Louise tells her only friend, another nanny, back in France. “So I can sleep when I want, eat whatever I like.”

  On the other hand, Louise cannot bear the thought of losing Myriam and Paul. She yearns “to create a world with them, to find her place and live there, to dig herself a niche, a burrow, a warm hiding place.”

  Needless to say, Louise never relocates to her Greek island. Perhaps, as Myriam comes to believe, she really is a child at heart. Far from being a comforting notion, however, this may mean that Louise’s deepest desire is to supplant her beloved employers’ children, little Mila and baby Adam.

  Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a freelance writer and book critic.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/07/lullaby-by-leila-slimani-book-review
  Word count: 1081

  Lullaby by Leila Slimani review – a truly horrific, sublime thriller
  This tense, deftly written novel about a perfect nanny’s transition into a monster will take your breath away

  Julie Myerson

  Sun 7 Jan 2018 01.30 EST
  Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.35 EST
  Leila Slimani: ‘ratchets up the tension with a genuine and mounting sense of dread’
  Leila Slimani: ‘ratchets up the tension with a genuine and mounting sense of dread.’ Photograph by Reuters

  If you’ve ever been paid to look after someone else’s children – and I have – then you will know what a queasy, bittersweet transaction it is. A nanny wields such emotional power, despite a sometimes appalling lack of rights or status or future. And that’s without the guilt of working parents, desperate to do the right thing by their children (and themselves), yet doomed always to be anxious, suspicious, insecure and vulnerable.

  It’s an explosive cocktail, and Leïla Slimani’s deft, often agonising novel shakes it up with a precision that takes your breath away.

  Myriam and Paul are a successful, well-heeled Parisian couple – Paul a rising star of the music industry, his wife a lawyer, passionate about her career. When two children come along in quick succession, they convince themselves that life can – and will – carry on as normal. But stuck at home with the kids, Myriam fast loses her sense of self. When a friend offers her a job in his law firm, she knows she must go for it. But it can only work if reliable childcare can be found.

  Enter Louise, an eerily ageless, doll-like widow who, with her prim Peter Pan collar, pink-painted fingernails, fastidious manner and unerring ability to entertain and enchant children, feels like the answer to their prayers. Before long she has made herself indispensable to the family, not only solving their childcare problems but also their housekeeping and cleaning ones. The couple cannot remember how they ever managed without this Mary Poppins figure in their lives.

  The Paris of Slimani’s story is a harsh, uneven and depraved city, corroded by poverty and sexual exploitation

  It’s no spoiler to say that this is a murder story. We know from page one that both these very young children will be killed by their nanny. The precise details – a warm bath, a sharp ceramic sushi knife, the various neighbours who now convince themselves they saw something awry from the start – seep out with chilling slowness. But what we’re really waiting for is a motive, and Slimani ratchets up the tension by scattering clues, some so distressing that you read on with a genuine and mounting sense of dread.

  An early scene where, playing hide-and-seek and remaining successfully hidden, the nanny spies on the children’s lengthy and drawn-out “anguish” and “panic … as if she’s studying the death throes of a fish she’s just caught”, makes for disturbing reading. But even darker is the later episode when, retrieving an old chicken carcass the mother has binned, the nanny teaches her charges to tear the dry meat off with their fingers, letting them drink “big glasses of Fanta as they ate, so they wouldn’t choke”. The whole idea is pretty macabre, but it’s the sly banality of the “glasses of Fanta” detail that makes it truly horrific.

  But what raises this why-dunnit way above the usual killer-nanny thriller is that it’s also a fantastically well-wrought portrait of social, economic – and ultimately moral – distress and deprivation. In a series of flashbacks so vivid that I’m reluctant to call them that, Louise’s brutal, sometimes mentally unhinged past comes slowly to light. Domestic violence, unpaid bills, the almost-aborted daughter she could not bring herself to love: the Paris of Slimani’s story is a harsh, uneven and depraved city, corroded by poverty and sexual exploitation. Hardly surprising that the hapless, often immigrant childcare providers form an alienated underclass all of their own, with their “shameful secrets” and “humiliations”, not to mention the heart-sinking realisation that their charges will grow up to be people who neither care about, nor even recognise them.

  Louise longs for that recognition. We learn that in all her life she’s never had a room of her own, nor once had a meal cooked for her. It makes a terrible kind of sense that this brutalised, displaced person has “only one desire” – a wish to “dig herself a niche, a burrow, a warm hiding place” within a real family. Knowing that Myriam and Paul’s kids will soon cease to need her, Louise becomes dangerously obsessed with the idea of her employer having another baby. When it becomes all too clear that this is not about to happen, she simply becomes dangerous.
  Macron appoints author Leïla Slimani to champion French language
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  Whether you believe this – and whether the crime ultimately makes sense – will depend on how convinced you are by Slimani’s prose (translated from the French by Sam Taylor). But what sublime prose it is. What appears at first to be a conventionally enough told tale soon gathers velocity, taking more and more risks as it gallops between viewpoints and tenses, introducing new and pungent characters to illuminate the narrative and seem absolutely relevant for a page or so before disappearing again. Some might find this tiresome, but I found it thrilling. And that’s without even mentioning the acid, throwaway beauty of so many of Slimani’s descriptions and phrases. The result is that you are taken deep into a fragile, damaged yet somehow rationally irrational psyche. I closed this book feeling very shaken but also with a sense that I’d just had an experience that almost no other art form could have given me. Long live the novel.

  In November last year, President Macron apparently bestowed upon Slimani the job of “promoting the French language and its culture”. Quite what that means, I’m not sure, but he did good. I’d happily vote for any world leader who was moved by this intelligent and unerringly humane piece of work.

  • Lullaby by Leila Slimani is published by Faber (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders o

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