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    Her Father's Daughter
    Unavailable
    Her Father's Daughter
    Unavailable
    Her Father's Daughter
    Ebook139 pages1 hour

    Her Father's Daughter

    By Marie Sizun

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A taut and subtle family drama from France.

    A little girl lives happily with her mother in war-torn Paris. She has never met her father, a prisoner of war in Germany. But then he returns and her mother switches her devotion to her husband. The girl realizes that she must win over her father to recover her position in the family. She confides a secret that will change their lives.

    Why Peirene chose to publish this book: ‘This is a poetic story about a girl’s love for her father. Told from the girl’s perspective, but with the clarity of an adult’s mind, we experience her desire to be noticed by the first man in her life. A rare examination of the bonds and boundaries between father and daughter.’ Meike Ziervogel

    ‘A delicate, discreet novel. Like its little heroine. Impressive.’ Sud Ouest Dimanche

    ‘Sizun’s beautifully controlled and simple story captures the surprisingly clear gaze of a little girl who discovers how adults excel in the art of concealment.’ Le Nouvel Observateur

    ‘This story brings to mind, like a slap in the face, our forgotten childhood memories. We remember the way adults fail to hear the tiny cries of the heart.’ Marie Claire
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeirene Press
    Release dateJun 13, 2016
    ISBN9781908670298
    Unavailable
    Her Father's Daughter
    Author

    Marie Sizun

    Marie Sizun is a prize-winning French author. She was born in 1940 and has taught literature in Paris, Germany and Belgium. She now lives in Paris. She has published seven novels and a memoir. Her Father’s Daughter was her first novel and was short-listed for the Prix Femina.

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    Reviews for Her Father's Daughter

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This is quite a short story of a young child and the conflict that love causes. France is not called that, she'd referred to as "The child" almost throughout doesn;t know her father, who left Paris to fight before she was born. She's now 4 or so and is happily living life with her mother, who she loves intensely. Things start to change when she hears that her Daddy will be comming home. She asks a prescient question of her mother, will mother love the child more than the father - to which the mother say yes. To the child, love is a bit like a cake, and that any love given to the father is love taken away from the child. I'm not sure love works like that, but it is one possible conclusion. The father returns home and the child suffers as the parents restablish a relaitonship that seems to have little time for the child. She balances between them, seemingly not the centre of attention of either. The father is also suffering the aftereffects of having been a POW (we assume) and is somewhat volatile. Gradually things settle and she is able to establish a relationship with him - one that supercedes the relationship with her mother. And then the child, unknowingly, tells her father a secret, wanting to bring him even closer, and ends up changing everything for ever. The story is told somewhat disjointedly, the child can't always remember timing or events in detail, there is a sense of things happeneing and then there are details that go on to be memories. That rings true to me, I have a number of very details freeze fram memories from my childhood, accompanied by a more general sense of the period. There is, layered on that, a more adult understanding of the time and what happened, such that you're almost seeing the story in stereo. The final chapter is haunting and beautiful and heart rending all at once and brought a lump to my throat. A girl's relationship with her father is usually formative, in this you see it formed and fractured in a short period of time, and regret that it was out of the child's hands to repair.