Our Reading Journey
In our Fall 2026 session, we spent five weeks inside a single summer. On 18 July 1936, Montse is fifteen, and a landowner looks her up and down and declares that she seems suitably modest. The remark lands like a slap. Her brother José has just come back from the harvest near Lérima with his head full of libertarian slogans, and within days the village, and Montse with it, is turned upside down. Seventy-five years later, at ninety, she tells it all to her daughter in a French that keeps slipping into Spanish, while a second voice, Georges Bernanos writing from Majorca, records the other side of that same summer.
What struck the group first was how many voices fit inside a single page. The narrator quotes her mother, who quotes her brother, who quotes the pamphlets he brought home; the mother stops to savor a French word she has never heard, the daughter corrects the mother's grammar in a parenthesis, and the gossip of the village runs underneath it all like a chorus. We always know who is speaking. We are never quite sure who has the authority to tell the story. The effect is often very funny, and it is also a method: memory here is passed from hand to hand, contested and embroidered, and the village emerges as a living organism, full of rumors, jealousies, and sudden reversals of opinion.
That polyphony prepared our longest discussion, about where political convictions come from. The rivalry between José, the anarchist dreamer, and Diego, who arrived as a boy in the household of the village's richest family and grows into its Communist organizer, began long before either of them had read a line of theory, in a schoolyard and a humiliation neither forgot. Salvayre lets us watch old wounds put on ideological clothing, and neighbors change their doctrines as their interests shift, without ever reducing the revolution to pettiness. The joy Montse remembers is real, and so is the bitterness that circled it. We left asking how a book can honor a hope and still look squarely at what corroded it.
About the Author
Lydie Salvayre was born in 1948 to Spanish Republicans who had crossed into France during the Retirada of 1939 and grew up in the mix of French and Spanish her mother spoke, the language she gives Montse in Pas pleurer. She trained as a doctor and worked for years as a child psychiatrist before devoting herself to writing. Across some twenty books, she has built a voice that sets high rhetoric against street speech and turns laughter, farce, and a Rabelaisian appetite for the body against every posture of authority. La Compagnie des spectres received the Prix Novembre in 1997 and Pas pleurer the Prix Goncourt in 2014.