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Welcome everyone. I'm looking forward to our discussion of Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné.

Who is with us?

Who has started the book?

Who has finished the book?

I have just finished the book, but haven't rated or reviewed it yet. Compulsive stuff - looking forward to the discussion.

I have read it and await discussion.

Welcome everyone to our official start date!

I've just re-read the novel. Maybe we can start off the conversation with:

1) your general impression of the novel,

2) any personal likes and dislikes that stand out for you about the novel

3) whether you were reminded of other recent novels you've read, in particular, novels about girls in peril and growing up in troubled families. This is a fairly specific question but the novel 'pinged' me as I read, where I kept finding myself thinking about how it compared with novels that have this same premise, and also, I've noticed that some of the reviews mention other novels in them.

1 A compulsive read and an interesting narrative voice.
2 A few things seemed rather implausible - how could the father afford his hobby as a big game hunter, the time travel twist at the end, the ice cream accident, but maybe these elements lightened what would otherwise have been a very grim narrative.
3 The Discomfort of Evening seems the most obvious, though for me that had more gratuitous unpleasantness

I thought of Discomfort of Evening too. That book is written in first person, present tense, and I feel trapped in the present day horror and in the traumatized child's point of view. A suffocating read.

I also thought about Ghost Wall, and about The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns, published in 1959 and recently republished by NYRB. Especially striking to me is that both Ghost Wall and The Vet's Daughter have fathers in them who torture animals in socially acceptable ways (one as a vet, one as a hunter), just as family abuse is more or less socially accepted in the times/cultures these books are written about.

Even more interesting to me, in comparing The Vet's Daughter and Real Life, both of the first-person, female, child protagonists feel deep disdain for their mothers, and describe their mothers as animals. It feels psychologically valid and also very chilling that a child in an abusive family would feel contempt for her mother.

Hugh wrote: "the time travel twist at the end..."

Funny, I instantly thought her physics tutor had planted the gun with the message. I was so confused by reviews that say there are elements of fantasy in the novel!

The whipped cream accident felt to me like something that could happen, and maybe had happened in a news story that the author read about. It worked for me as an inciting incident. In general I'm very indulgent of something unexpected and unlikely happening in a novel as long as it happens close to the beginning. If it's near the end then I feel snookered.

I never thought about the big game hunting thing being an expensive prospect. I just loved the idea of a "carcass room" and the way the animals in it terrified the children.

I finished it, too, and found much to like in it. Lark -- I love the idea that the tutor planted the gun, but wouldn't the number have been one that had already been produced? Only time travel explains the future number, right?

Catherine, I agree - I didn't think of the tutor as a possible solution but producing a gun that is untraceable would require a very different skillset to theoretical physics. The ice cream incident seems so bizarre that I suspect Lark is right that it was based on something real.

I should also say that I was nitpicking because the question led me to think about what I disliked, and I gave this book a higher rating than The Discomfort of Evening. The Comyns sounds interesting.

I need to think on this gun thing. It would make the book more of a puzzle to have time travel a chosen element by the author. It doesn't feel necessary to the plot--it seemed there were plenty of other guns around.

To me it felt like the obvious answer that Professor Pavlović was the gun-giver. I never second-thought it. He does say "if there's anyone to be got rid of, know that Lyuba's husband made a good meal for the aquatic fauna of Tel Aviv Harbor." He came off something like a former Mossad agent to me.

One thing that I admire about this novel is that there are no extraneous parts. Everything connects.

The thing I admire most, though, is the voice. First person, past tense gives the author the versatility to make something feel very naive and very earnest, where I feel close to this child, but also the past-tense allows the author to make far more sophisticated observations along the way than a child would.

Oof, I read the majority of the book in one sitting since once I hit the "game night" I just needed to plow through and make sure the children were ok.

I absolutely loved the gun in the end and am 100% behind it being the time travel answer because damn we need some levity!

Hugh I hadn't thought about the fact that big game hunting is crazy expensive.

My biggest dislike was the Champion. I'm sure the author had her reasons for how that unfolded, but I thought it was too much on top of the father. I didn't like that she still held that moment and the Champion in such high esteem in the end.

Hugh, I'm just a few chapters in, but the 1% hobbies of the father seemed wildly out of scale for an accountant. That nightly tipple is around $50 a bottle. Even if it lasts a week, that's a lot of coin. OTOH, The narrator is warm and delightful, and the first two sentences are worthy of Bulwer-Lytton.

Mark, all kinds of spoilers coming up in my comment...




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Bretnie wrote: "My biggest dislike was the Champion. I'm sure the author had her reasons for how that unfolded, but I thought it was too much on top of the father. I didn't like that she still held that moment and the Champion in such high esteem in the end. ..."

Bretnie, your comment made me ask myself, "why would the author include this grotesque betrayal/added child abuse scene?"

And the answer that comes to me is because it amps the story to a fever-pitch level, where her father witnesses her having sex in the forest with a man and must punish her for it...it's the inciting incident that triggers her father to a level of violence that maybe he's ready to kill her.

So it serves a story-telling function well, But I was also disappointed by it somehow. This protagonist is often wrong about people, but she isn't ever completely wrong, the way she is with the Champion even after he rapes her. It felt off-character to make her not instantly perceive that she's been taken advantage of and abused.

If the author had given the protagonist a sense that she'd been used and betrayed by the Champion, instead of her still feeling kindly toward him, then I would have been on board, and the ending could have played out in the same way.

lark wrote: "I need to think on this gun thing. It would make the book more of a puzzle to have time travel a chosen element by the author. It doesn't feel necessary to the plot--it seemed there were plenty of ..."
I liked that the protagonist assumed the gun was planted by her future self and made her feel proud. So my first thought went to time travel indeed, but I like your explanation about the physics professor also...

Bretnie wrote: "Oof, I read the majority of the book in one sitting since once I hit the "game night" I just needed to plow through and make sure the children were ok."

I hit the twist at the beginning of this night in the train and I almost wanted to miss my stop and keep reading.

I really liked the voice of this book and the way it drew me in.

Somehow I missed that it was time for the discussion of this book! I read it in August, after "splurging" on the cheap Kindle edition. Almost wish I hadn't. As with others, it reminded me of The Discomfort of the Evening, which I hated. This one I did not hate as much. No enjoyment here, other than the time she got to spend with the physics prof. I found the whipped cream explosion believable but not the father's big game hunting hobby. I found the physics prof's wife a strange addition to the story - what did she show? Finally, it was definitely time travel and, my prediction, triggered her to keep up her studies.

lark, you put it very well - that she didn't have a sense she was being abused. And while the father got what he deserved, the Champion is left without consequences.

Linda, I like that you tie the ending to an optimist future for the protagonist - that she continues to be motivated and driven.

Hi Linda--I thought of The Discomfort of Evening too but mostly to ask myself why I hated that book so much, and loved this one so much.

The answer is the narrator. Dieudonné's narrator is full of life and the will to live. She's a survivor and she moves past her obsession with guilt because of her love for her brother, and her need to save him.

I was interested in seeing if there can be a redemptive story that isn't sentimental and that begins with a child feeling responsible for the death of another person. It seems that most children in real life don't forgive themselves, and that it's very common for the adults in their life to become mute and act as if the killing never happened, which leaves the child to struggle on her own to make sense of things. Rijnveld's plot takes the easier course, I think--the child never gets over it. I found Dieudonné's answer more compelling.

Has anyone else here also read The Laws of the Skies by French author Grégoire Courtois? This little novel was also quite a big hit and won a few awards in France, and also has a peculiar mix of real/surreal, and is about children and death. It reminds me of this novel, too, in that it seems to have begun with the author setting up a mental/intellectual puzzle--'what if -x- happened?' and then draping the fiction of the story around that puzzle.

I'm a bit late to this, having only finished the novel the weekend. And I generally just lurk in this group because I’m really bad at reading on schedule�

My very first reaction was to the weird inclusion of “kobus� in the second paragraph of the novel. Turns out it’s waterbuck (kobus ellipsiprymnus), so another Sub-Saharan African antelope like the others listed here which helps to locate the father’s hunting. I'm very familiar with the antelope of this region, but have never heard “kobus� used colloquially instead of “waterbuck�, so this threw me a bit. (At first I thought it was a misspelling of “kudu�, another large Sub-Saharan antelope. I checked, and “kubos� is also used in the French, but I’m still a bit surprised at this translation.)

Anyway, that very first scene, coupled with the incongruity of the father's hunting hobbies, first mentioned by Hugh above, actually managed to put me off a bit. The same goes for the elephant tusk � those are huge and I cannot really see a small girl sneaking around with one (according to Wikipedia, the tusk of an adult cow weighs 18�20 kg and that of a bull 50�79 kg with the record well over 100!). Maybe it was just a really small elephant?

So I didn’t have a very favourable impression of the setting of the novel. The stuffed menagerie seemed to serve as a convenient (lazy?) backdrop (like the car graveyard), but the author did not actually seem to know much about the props she employed in this way. The setting does however work at a symbolic level and fits in well with the fantastic elements, but like the inclusion of Yael and her face, many elements seemed just a bit overdone to me. Of the books mentioned in this thread I can only compare with The Discomfort of Evening, but somehow that setting rang much truer (to me, of course. I’m not looking for realism, but have trouble putting my finger on what seemed off here.)

Still, I enjoyed the novel more than what may appear from the above, although there are some troubling elements, especially regarding the Champion, as others have noted.

Mari wrote: "I'm a bit late to this, having only finished the novel the weekend. And I generally just lurk in this group because I’m really bad at reading on schedule�

My very first reaction was to the weird ..."

You are not late - the discussion is scheduled to last the whole month, and like all of our discussions, it will remain open after the nominal end date.

All of these comments about the incongruities and impossibilities in this novel are so interesting to me on their own, and doubly interesting because I blew right past them and typically incongruities trip me up. Everything felt 'real' to me with the exception of the night hunt which seemed fictionally thrilling but over-the-top.

Now I'm wondering why I bought this fictional world so completely, and still do. It may have to do with the specificity of the world Dieudonné describes. I have a very precise mental map in my head of this place, beginning with inside the house--where the bedrooms are, the kitchen, the carcass room--how the dead animals are arranged in that room and how they look--and then the street, the way the homes in "the Demo" look--the Little Gallows Wood and the "labyrinth of broken cars"--I see it all vividly. It's remarkably clear as a place in my head, like a memory of a real place.

The other reason I didn't question was because of the narrative voice. I'm really in awe of it--the combination of lyricism and childishness.

And then the people--I can picture them all, and where they live in relation to the narrator's home.

I see where the goat pen is--the look of the backyard.

Maybe it works for me on the level of an Edward Scissorshands sort of place--however intensely exaggerated, it feels like a distillation of a real place with real people in it.

lark wrote: "Maybe it works for me on the level of an Edward Scissorshands sort of place--however intensely exaggerated, it feels like a distillation of a real place with real people in it. "

I love this - I read it the same way lark, with little regard for too much reality, but that's in line with how I read most fiction.

Did we already say how great the first paragraph of the book is? Laying out the carcass room right from the beginning set such an interesting tone to the book - the grimness but also the dark humor?

Early in the thread Lark asked questions, one of which was if the novel reminded us of others. I was reluctant to answer at first, since what came to my mind was more generic and more young adult. I thought of the Miriam Black series by Chuck Wendig, Blackbirds What they share in common is an appeal to the emotional( visceral scenes, horrific and thriller events, sex, etc.), easy to understand language with rapid pace, comic book or cartoonish reality. Where Dieudonné and other more literary authors differ is that they offer more literary elements to go with the generic. From film we would think of Tarantino. In books I think Angela Carter, Kurt Vonnegut, or more recently Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe. Having grown up with comics, this type of novel seems very familiar to me. It seems an updating of an E.C. comics plot line. Personally, I am mixed on these in judgement, praising some and condemning others and on the whole critical of sensationalism in literary fiction simply because it's elements automatically draw a body response, thus making an aspect of a book more memorable despite the craft involved in creation. When authors consciously employ such techniques not as a gimmick but as a theme (like Poe for example) I am a lot less critical. I think that applies here. Some of the other young adult elements bother me though. I don't think we can subject the book to much more intellectual scrutiny than we could Star Wars or Harry Potter, unless we limit the scrutiny to the books that attempt the same thing.

Lark, My associations are more to a fairy story: Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard, perhaps. The intercourse didn't surprise or shock me; it was clear that our heroine welcomed and had anticipated the attention (and, it IS a fairy tale, after all). I was more shocked by her lack of guilt when the siphon exploded, though her diversion of that emotion into the desire to care for Sam makes sense.

Mark wrote: "The intercourse didn't surprise or shock me; it was clear that our heroine welcomed and had anticipated the attention (and, it IS a fairy tale, after all)."

Just to be clear, it isn't intercourse. It's an adult sexually abusing a 15 year old girl. Whether or not she welcomed it is irrelevant to the fact that he is an adult and she is not.

Sam wrote: "I don't think we can subject the book to much more intellectual scrutiny than we could Star Wars or Harry Potter, unless we limit the scrutiny to the books that attempt the same thing. ..."

I can see what you mean about the YA or comics-like exaggerations of this novel, but otoh doesn't it more or less follow the classic conventions of Greek tragedy, where exaggerated archetypes meet and clash? Here is a novel in which the daughter defies her authoritarian, all-powerful father, and the son kills that father...it's kind of Electra-like.

lark wrote: "Sam wrote: "I don't think we can subject the book to much more intellectual scrutiny than we could Star Wars or Harry Potter, unless we limit the scrutiny to the books that attempt the same thing. ..."

I agree completely. I don't think the comparisons are mutually exclusive but rather the opposite. Star Wars follows Campbell's hero theories almost to a t and I read somewhere that Lucas followed Campbell's theories in the writing of the script. I think the mythic classic archetypal elements are part of why these have so much appeal.

I'm not sure I'm on board with this being a hero's journey though, or part of the Campbell theory. For one thing his theory is very male-centered.

The deeper messages in this novel seem to be gendered in a very deliberate way and that's where I'm thinking it reminds me of the Greek tragedians who were also examining gender roles in a very deliberate way through characters like Iphigenia, Electra, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Medea, Antigone.

This doesn't need to have been in the head of Adeline Dieudonné, though, as she was writing this novel. What definitely was in her head were notions of gender and power. What I love about the protagonist is that she defeats her father. She prevails. It's a very powerful story for me in that way.

LindaJ^ wrote: "I found the physics prof's wife a strange addition to the story - what did she show? ..."

Linda, to me she is a very important character to the story. Along with adding the idea to the story (and into the protagonist's head) that misogyny and the abuse of women are universal problems, her presence also gives the protagonist hope that these terrors can be defeated. Although, in her case, the victory comes at a terrible cost, it's real.

When she emerged from the coma, she took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote: 'Lyuba and the baby are well.'...I realized she had won.

lark wrote: "I'm not sure I'm on board with this being a hero's journey though, or part of the Campbell theory. For one thing his theory is very male-centered.

The deeper messages in this novel seem to be gen..."

No, I agree again Medea and Antigone. I only meant the Hero's journey in reference to Star Wars suggesting it was a common element to see classical themss in comics or young adult works.

Thanks for the clarification, Sam.

Sometimes I think women and non-binary authors, just for the moment at least, have a lot more degrees of freedom to write fantasy and fairy-tale, and to still be considered ‘literary� rather than ‘genre,� because their work is so easily read through a gender/feminist lens.

This is just a feeling and not meant to be a complaint or a contentious statement so I hope it doesn’t come across that way.

lark wrote: "Linda, to me she is a very important character to the story. Along with adding the idea to the story (and into the protagonist's head) that misogyny and the abuse of women are universal problems, her presence also gives the protagonist hope that these terrors can be defeated. Although, in her case, the victory comes at a terrible cost, it's real."

I had the same reaction to the professor's wife. It solidified our protagonist's feeling that what her father was doing was wrong. I love how you put it though lark - that they can be defeated, but not without pain.

Interesting discussion, everyone. Certainly has me rethinking the value of the book!

LindaJ^ wrote: "Interesting discussion, everyone. Certainly has me rethinking the value of the book!"

I feel the same way, Linda. In my case I was unquestioningly enthralled by the novel, and hearing about how others of us were pulled out of the story by "I didn't buy it" feelings has been especially interesting for me--the whole idea of when/how/why a fictional story becomes implausibly fictional is an interesting question.

I also like the way we all reacted to the same scenes in different ways. It's given me a better perspective for how I read, and what my blind spots are.

While I am a member of this group, I am usually unable to get the choices from my library. And when I do, it is way past the discussion, so I don't usually participate.

However, I just got and read this book. Wow! All of my thoughts have been discussed. I, too, struggled with how the dad afforded big game hunting but it didn't detract from the story for me. I didn't think much about where the gun came from, but hope it was the Professor.

Again, thanks for this recommendation.

Anita wrote: "While I am a member of this group, I am usually unable to get the choices from my library. And when I do, it is way past the discussion, so I don't usually participate.

However, I just got and re..."

Anita,

I am glad you enjoyed it. It is never too late to comment on our discussions - that is why we keep them open beyond the "end date".

Wasn't able to join in for this one (and am about 20 book reviews behind, as well), but I'm surprised no one mentioned the hunt where the narrator is served up as prey by the father. That scene is still stuck in my head---not so much for its details but the the sort of tension and lump in my throat it created.

The implausibility of some aspects already mentioned (whether the father could afford big game hunting; the reality of the neighborhood structure/appearance; etc.) didn't detract from me being pulled right through this book thanks to the narrative voice and the ongoing tension. I'm glad it got nominated and discussed---thanks, lark!

Hard to imagine that a father would do that to his daughter. Brings to mind how fathers, at times, are assumed by some to want a son rather than a daughter and how, in some cultures at some points in time, consider daughters as a burden. In some respects women remain second class citizens - inherent bias.

Anita wrote: "I just got and read this book. Wow! ..."

Thanks for reviving the conversation, Anita! It sounds like we had similar reactions. I loved hearing everyone's impressions here and discussing the book more thoroughly too.

Marc, I recently read the book again--like in the last week (!)--and I agree the 'hunt' scene is really something. This read, I was thoughtful about how inept the boys are, and how the 'winner' gets there by cheating. But it doesn't matter. All the power is still on the side of the 'hunters.'

While we're on the subject I'd like to recommend a few other books--this is my take on "if you liked Real Life, then try 'x'"--

I've already mentioned The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns. There are some really interesting parallels even though the books were written decades apart.

Also:

I'm Not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Ladivine by Marie NDiaye

Thanks for the recommendations, Lark. I'm intrigued by Ladivine and found a new copy on Abebooks for $4!

I'm with you on the power being on the side of the hunters. Power is a tricky thing - without it, hard to accomplish things; with it, hard not to abuse it. Makes me think of that experiment a college prof did with his students - half played the role of guard, half played the role of prisoner - or the story told in a book I don't remember where a teacher had the kids see what it was like to be treated differently because of a physical difference -- those with blue eyes were inferior and then it would switch to those with brown eyes were -- and you know what happened.

Linda,
Your comments made me think about how group dynamics also influence individual behavior (i.e., people will do things in a group they would never do by themselves). And power seems to encourage groups to quickly lean toward cruelty/abuse.

lark,
I think this would be an interesting reread. I wish I was the type to reread, in general. I think the If-You-Liked-This-You-Might-Also-Like-______ should be a normal part of our discussions (certainly, it comes up sometimes, but also seems like it would be a fun thing to include regularly).