Marie-Hélène Lafon, Histoire du fils
Our Reading Journey
Our session opened on the scene the novel itself opens on: in 1908, five-year-old Armand runs out to greet a household servant he's fond of and dies in the accident that follows, an accident that also breaks the mind of the woman involved. Armand's twin brother, Paul, carries that loss for the rest of his life without anyone in the family ever really naming it. Decades later, that unspoken death sits behind everything that happens to the next generation: Paul fathers a son, André, without ever learning the boy exists, and André grows up in Figeac believing his aunt Hélène is his mother. The book moves between 1908 and 2008 across twelve chapters, out of order, and the reader ends up doing the same work of reconstruction that the family itself keeps avoiding.
The discussion spent real time on how deliberately Lafon builds her form around this one unspoken death: the chapters skip and double back the way memory does around something a family has agreed never to discuss, and the reader has to wait for pieces of Armand's story the same way André waits for pieces of his own. We talked about Gabrielle, André's mother, as a woman who wanted a life the family and the era weren't built to let her have, which complicates any easy judgment of her leaving him with Hélène and Léon. The rural Cantal setting, close to Lafon's own background, keeps all of these themes grounded in specific, unglamorous work and land. By the time André's own son, Antoine, finally reconstructs the family tree, the novel has quietly made its point: a family can pass down an absence as carefully as it passes down a name.
About the Author
Marie-Hélène Lafon was born in 1962 in Aurillac, in Cantal, and grew up on her family's farm before leaving for a religious boarding school in Saint-Flour and then Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and passed the agrégation in 1987. She taught classical literature in Paris for decades while writing on the side, publishing her first novel, Le Soir du chien, at thirty-four; it won the Prix Renaudot des lycéens in 2001. Les Pays won the Globe de Cristal in 2012, and Histoires won the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 2016. Histoire du fils, published in 2020, won the Prix Renaudot outright, and the following year Clermont Auvergne University renamed its humanities library in her honor. Her fiction returns often to the Cantal countryside she left but never stopped writing from.
