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LYDIE SALVAYRE (born 1948) is the daughter of Spanish Republicans who fled to France during the Retirada of 1939. She trained as a doctor and worked for years as a child psychiatrist in the Paris suburbs before giving herself fully to writing. Across some twenty books she has forged a voice that turns comedy against power, using laughter, farce, and a Rabelaisian relish for the body to puncture every posture of authority. Her French is a baroque instrument that collides high rhetoric with street speech, and her novels often stage a dialogue with the writers she loves. La Compagnie des spectres (1997) won the Prix Novembre; Pas pleurer (2014) won the Prix Goncourt.
Pas pleurer braids together two voices and two visions of a single year, 1936, the first summer of the Spanish Civil War. The first belongs to Montse, the author's own mother, now very old, whose memory has let go of almost everything except those few luminous weeks when Barcelona and the Catalan villages rose into revolution and a sheltered village girl discovered politics, desire, and freedom all at once. She tells it to her daughter in a language of her own, a French running over with Spanish, the fragnol that Salvayre grew up in and credits with having made her a writer.
The second voice is that of Georges Bernanos. A Catholic and a man of the right, he was living on Majorca that same summer and watched the Francoist repression unfold with the open blessing of the Church. The testimony he drew from it, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938), remains one of the most searing documents of the war. Salvayre lets the two accounts run side by side and never forces them to agree; Montse's exhilaration and Bernanos's horror press against each other on facing pages.
That collision is both the book's subject and its style. Salvayre writes in short, driving bursts, tender and brutal by turns, letting Montse's hybrid speech carry a joy that the official histories of both sides quietly erased. She hands the last word to the losers of history and asks what a revolution felt like from the inside before it was crushed and forgotten. What remains of a luminous summer once everyone who lived it is gone?