The Tin Flute: how to make even misery beautiful
If you went to high school in French, you've probably read some Gabrielle Roy. So have I. I thought it was nice, but a little heavy. Too poetic and full of misery. But those were just excerpts. You need the context to understand why the author is required reading in all schools.
Florentine is a poor young adult living in the Saint-Henri district of Montreal at the very beginning of World War II. She is frail and fragile, but bubbling inside (a bit like me). And then she meets Jean.
John is a more aristocratic type. He dresses well, has a haughty air, and puts his studies in mathematics ahead of his sanity. When he crosses Florentine's path, he does everything to destabilize her by playing alternately the seducer and the indifferent. For an unfortunately understandable reason, Florentine falls in love with him.
Big torments of teenagers in love. She sees him in her soup, his indifference undermines her self-confidence to the point of despair, and Jean continues to date her mostly out of pity.
Meanwhile, Florentine's family is sinking deeper and deeper into misery. The mother, a small, fat and tired woman, is about to give birth to her tenth baby (or so), while they barely have enough money to feed themselves. The father, completely disconnected from reality, loses one by one his small jobs and dreams of starting a company,
It is a story of dark misery at the very beginning of the war and in the cruel Montreal winter. But despite everything, Gabrielle Roy manages to make it beautiful. Her writing, phenomenal, makes us feel the biting cold, the torments of Florentine. There is no black and white; we understand that even Jean, whom we have every right to hate, is in the same boat as everyone else. We feel exhausted in the place of Florentine's mother, and we count with her her last money...
This is my kind of reading. Contemplative, beautiful, dramatic, young. But don't expect any suspense or twists. Because life, sometimes, moves slowly, and events as well as emotions need time to take place.
Gabrielle Roy
14,36 $
