The Book of Mother: A Novel

by Violaine Huisman, Leslie Camhi (Translator)

Overview

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize
A New York Times Notable Book
A Library Journal Best Book of 2021

A “marvelous...superbly effective” (The New Yorker) debut novel about a young woman coming of age with a dazzling yet damaged mother who lived and loved in extremes.

Met by rave reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and more, this stunning translation of Violaine Huisman’s “witty, immersive autofiction showcases a Parisian childhood with a charismatic, depressed parent” (Oprah Daily). Beautiful and magnetic, Catherine, a.k.a. “Maman,” smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly, and her daughter Violaine wouldn’t have it any other way.

But when Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown, everything changes. Even as Violaine and her sister long for their mother’s return, once she’s back Maman’s violent mood swings and flagrant disregard for personal boundaries soon turn their home into an emotional landmine. As the story of Catherine’s own traumatic childhood and adolescence unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive.

With spectacular ferocity of language, a streak of dark humor, and stunning emotional bravery, The Book of Mother is an exquisitely wrought story of a mother’s dizzying heights and devastating lows, and a daughter who must hold her memory close in order to surrender, and finally move on.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982108793
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	392,502
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title Fugitive parce que reine, her debut novel The Book of Mother was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.

Leslie Camhi is a New York-based essayist and cultural journalist who writes for The New York Times, Vogue, and other publications. She is a frequent contributor to artists’ monographs and museum catalogues. The Book of Mother is her first book-length translation.

Editorial Reviews

A Library Journal Best Book of 2021

"Marvelous... superbly effective. One develops a soft spot for many of Huisman’s characters, despite their hideous and sometimes criminal behavior. Their larger-than-life swagger is the first lure. Their human frailty is the second. [The Book of Mother is] a labor of love, which considers primal conflict with a tender psychological acuity. It’s as if Huisman has fought with her mother, surrendered to her, and finally moved on. —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

"[Maman]—proud, intoxicating, and manic-depressive—still carries the confusion and loneliness of her own childhood and is determined to hold her daughters close. Hiding 'neither her body nor her lovers,' Maman tells stories from her life 'continuously, ad nauseam, an unbearable monologue.' Huisman initially narrates from her childhood perspective, then zooms out to cover the whole of Maman’s life, in a tableau that captures a filial love as fierce and frank as its central figure."—The New Yorker, "In Brief" Review

"A prize-winning sensation in France, Huisman’s witty, immersive autofiction showcases a Parisian childhood with a charismatic, depressed parent."—Oprah Daily

“The Book of Mother, a portrait in three parts, is also a study in perspective, a rummaging for the vantage from which its author, Violaine Huisman, might see her mother, Catherine, anew...Huisman declares her mission: to return her mother to earth, 'become the narrator of her story in order to give her back her humanity'...That the madness of Violaine’s childhood left her 'deeply marked' is both hardly in doubt and not the subject of this tender, searching book. Instead, the daughter figures as both a character in her mother’s story and its teller, taking one last survey of the wreckage, as if her own life depends on it.”—New York Times Book Review

"Camhi’s translation from the French of Huisman’s debut novel conveys Violaine's steady compulsion to understand and explain interspersed with gorgeous details ... Love hurts; Huisman elegantly examines how and why."
—Kirkus, starred

"In The Book of Mother, Violaine Huisman has painted an indelible portrait of a brilliant, beautiful, mad and maddening woman, expressing the joy of holding her mercurial attention and also the terrible cost of that intimacy. The long, graceful, neo-Proustian sentences break like waves, each one conveying both the depth of the narrator’s attachment to Maman and the peril of relying on someone who was at once overwhelmingly powerful and devastatingly fragile. Reading about Maman’s decay is like watching a citadel crumble under siege. This is an exquisite evocation of the passionate, reciprocal love that can illuminate its objects, or destroy them, or both. No one who reads this captivating book will ever forget Maman."
—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far From the Tree

"In lucid, unflinching—and here beautifully translated—prose, this stunning debut novel mines the singular flaws and graces of the mother-daughter connection. An ode to its titular parent, an 'impossible' yet 'irreplaceable' woman in full, The Book of Mother is also an unforgettable meditation on the searing pain of loss and the enduring power of love."
—Caroline Weber, author of Proust's Duchess and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Violaine Huisman summons her late mother’s voice in order to speak with and through and for her. The result is a charged portrait of a vibrant and destructive woman as imagined by the daughter who believed it was her job to save her. The prose has the unmistakable urgency and authority of love, producing an homage without idealization, an elegy without false consolation. The Book of Mother is at once an act of radical identification and a way of letting go.”
—Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School

From the Publisher

★ 08/09/2021

Huisman’s excellent debut chronicles the life of a charming but volatile Frenchwoman. Catherine, a manic-depressive dancer and mother of two, is as prone to fits of rage and mood swings as she is to expressing her love for her daughters. Violaine, her youngest, recounts events that took place when she was 10, in 1989. Catherine’s third marriage has failed, and she intentionally drives her car with Violaine and Violaine’s older sister, Elsa, into oncoming traffic on the Champs-Élysées. They all survive, and the girls’ father, Antoine, Catherine’s second husband, arranges with their grandmother, Jacqueline, to have her committed. Violaine then charts Catherine’s bitter relationship with Jacqueline, and Jacqueline’s own painful history, having been forced by her parents to marry her rapist, Catherine’s father, whom she manages to later leave. Though Catherine has a short leg, she trains at eight to dance just like her mother, and the pair later open rival dance schools. Later, Catherine ends her stable first marriage for the wealthy Antoine. The novel’s final section follows Violaine and Elsa, now adults, as they try to carry out Catherine’s wishes after her suicide in her Paris apartment. Huisman’s storytelling ability is immense: Violaine unfurls the wide-ranging narrative like a raconteur at a party, and develops a kaleidoscopic portrait of Catherine. This thoughtful exploration of familial trauma and love will have readers riveted. Agent: Mark Kessler, Susanna Lea. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/01/2021

DEBUT We can never really know our mothers as individuals separate from ourselves, which is Huisman's rationale in calling this portrait of her mother Catherine's life a work of fiction. Still, the text is profoundly autobiographical; Huisman pieces together her narrative from vivid childhood memories as well as her mother's papers. Catherine was born into the working class in postwar France and rose to the haute bourgeoisie by exploiting wealthy men, as they also exploited her. Beautiful and charismatic, she taught ballet despite a childhood bout with polio and hid her limp through sheer will. (Catherine's own imperious mother had run a ballet studio.) Bipolar disorder nearly destroyed Catherine as she self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, took multiple lovers and husbands, and engaged in libertine sex. Yet she (and France's social safety net) ensured that her two daughters were well educated despite their unstable home life. VERDICT In this touching tribute to her eccentric mother's life and death, which also offers a wild view of swinging Paris during the 1960s and 1970s, Huisman is sardonic, furious, and sometimes humorous but always affectionate toward her mother. Her prose seems urgent, pulling the reader along, as if she's trying to outrun her grief. Highly recommended.—Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

★ 2021-07-28
A portrait of a life lived like a swiftly burning candle.

Known to her two daughters as “Maman,” to herself as “Catherine,” and to the world at large by a series of surnames that change with her tumultuous relationships, Catherine Cremnitz survived a lonely and illness-ridden childhood to be faced with even more complex indignities, familial and social, in her adult life. Mercurial, creative, thwarted, and with mental illness simmering beneath the surface, Catherine spins off course after yet another betrayal by a faithless man. The lives of her two daughters could have been counted among the considerable wreckage. The weight of feeling that it is your job to keep your mother alive is not easily shed, but Huisman’s narrator, Violaine—Catherine’s younger daughter—balances that burden with a recounting of the abandonments, assaults, betrayals, and disappointments which formed the beautiful and impetuous woman she and her sister, Elsa, adored. Violaine’s attempt to understand Catherine’s essential humanity (or, the Catherine who existed before she was Maman) relies upon the conflicting details shared by Catherine in her effort to convey her own story, but, as Violaine muses, “the truth of a life is the fiction that sustains it.” Camhi’s translation from the French of Huisman’s debut novel conveys Violaine's steady compulsion to understand and explain interspersed with gorgeous details such as the way Catherine’s cigarette-singed pillowcases resemble a target shot through by bullets. The names of Huisman’s characters will provoke discussion of the novel as autofiction, but the story here is bigger than that.

Love hurts; Huisman elegantly examines how and why.

Kirkus Reviews