The Alphonse Courrier Affair

by Marta Morazzoni, Emma Rose (Translator)

Overview

Alphonse Courrier possesses all the might reasonably make a man content: a prosperous ironmonger's business and a position of respect in his Auvergne village, a dutiful, coolly beautiful wife who runs an irreproachable household, two healthy sons, and a hidden mistress - "the ugliest girl in the village but probably the happiest".

Prying eyes and wagging tongues, however, are the life force in a small community, and though Courrier thinks he can play the village gossips with the same skill he brings to the card table, life has a way of dealing the hand you least expect ...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448130245
Publisher:	Random House
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	631 KB

About the Author

Marta Morazzoni was born in Milan in 1950. She teaches literature in a secondary school. She has written three novels and a volume of short stories, Girl in a Turban, described by The Times as "subtle, ironic, an altogether outstanding collection of stories". The Alphonse Courrier Affair was the winner of the prestigious Campiello Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, which is awarded to the author and translator jointly.

Emma Rose won the John Florio prize with the first book she translated, Marta Morazzoni's novel His Mother's House.

Editorial Reviews

The voice of an omniscient narrator who sounds like a homily-spouting village gossip initially draws us into, then unwisely distances us from, the cryptic events of this compact tale of adultery and family enmity, set in the early 1900s in a provincial town in France's Auvergne region ("a land of extinct volcanoes"). Morazzoni, the Italian author of Girl in a Turban (not reviewed) and The Invention of Truth (1993), is an accomplished miniaturist, and her deft portrayals of extroverted ironmonger Alphonse, his seemingly passive wife Agnès, and their neighbor Adèle Joffre ("the old maid nobody had wanted"), among others, slowly cohere into a potent melodrama—in its best moments reminiscent of François Mauriac's unsparing dramatizations of passions held in check until they inevitably, catastrophically erupt. Mannered though it is, Morazzoni's best book yet.

EBOOK COMMENTARY

The voice of an omniscient narrator who sounds like a homily-spouting village gossip initially draws us into, then unwisely distances us from, the cryptic events of this compact tale of adultery and family enmity, set in the early 1900s in a provincial town in France's Auvergne region ("a land of extinct volcanoes"). Morazzoni, the Italian author of Girl in a Turban (not reviewed) and The Invention of Truth (1993), is an accomplished miniaturist, and her deft portrayals of extroverted ironmonger Alphonse, his seemingly passive wife Agnès, and their neighbor Adèle Joffre ("the old maid nobody had wanted"), among others, slowly cohere into a potent melodrama—in its best moments reminiscent of François Mauriac's unsparing dramatizations of passions held in check until they inevitably, catastrophically erupt. Mannered though it is, Morazzoni's best book yet.

Kirkus Reviews