Plutôt la fin du monde qu'une écorchure à mon doigt by Paula Jacques (review)

Mathilde is writing the biography of her mother, Louison Desmarais. Louison is not called "Mom." Louison's older sister, Margot, brought up Mathilde. Louison, ever the blonde-haired blue-eyed coquette who loved smoking and adventure, left her family in Le Havre for Marseille in 1940 to take a boat for Alger and her fiancé Carlo. While this story is being told, Louison is facing her troisième âge and impending death in Le Havre with Margot. Louison's sister occasionally updates the information for the story by phone to Mathilde writing in Paris. The two-fold story of Louison in the past and in the present moves forward from 1940 with interruptions from the present moment when Mathilde, Margot, and Louison engage in conversation about the predicaments of dying and death. Louison experienced the Occupation after Carlo canceled their engagement when Louison was unable to cross the Mediterranean due to military priorities during wartime. Louison was thus sidetracked in Marseille and encountered such unforgettable local characters as the Corsican gangster Tonton, the Jewish Resistant David, the faiseuse d'anges La Salvadori, and the dog Georges. Louison incorporated her Catholic-school training as she deals with poverty, abortion, and hunger while remaining consistently a cigarette-smoking coquette. She had a child with the patriot David who left her to join the Resistance but promised to marry her after the war. Her discomfort as an unmarried mother was relieved by the solace of David's parents, the Jacobsons, who arrived in the Marseille region to escape the anti-Semitic practices in the Occupied Zone. When the Nazis invaded the Free Zone, Louison's former ease in Marseille with her Aryan appearance broke down as the reality of the violence by the Occupation's military, both German and French, visited her family. Subject to a rafle in northern Marseille, she escaped but was ever wary that her child's Jewish father would subject her and her child to being deported by the Nazis. Of course, since the narrator is Louison's daughter, the reader knows that Louison survives so the dramatic tension is lost in the bonding between daughter and mother that unites the two narratives in this story. Louison's constant need to party finally infects even the narrator and her Aunt Margot. Mathilde attributes the survival of both mother and daughter to her mother's joie de vivre. Along with that realization comes the need to call Louison maman. One of Louison's lovers, Christian, was called oncle by Mathilde for about ten years while she was in grade school. Mathilde credits him with having inspired her writing career because he encouraged her academic success when she was a child. But Louison is after all Mathilde, the writer's subject matter. By weaving the two significant strands in Louison's life, Mathilde composes a kind of tapestry portraying the maman for whom she longs. And la joie de vivre identified in Louison spurs Mathilde to write this entertaining story linking the Occupation to the present.