Company of Ghosts
1997
First Published
3.42
Average Rating
184
Number of Pages
When a bailiff turns up, a teenager tries to salvage her mother, their dignity and the TV. When a bailiff arrives at a housing project on the edge of Paris to draw up a routine inventory of goods in view of seizure, the reception he receives from Rose Melle and her teenage daughter is more than he has bargained for. Rose, forever unhinged by the trauma of childhood spent under Nazi occupation, mistakes him for a collaborationist thug and assails him with her alternately tragic and hilarious memories of Vichy France. In a narrative that lurches giddily between 1942 and 1997, Salvayre picks at the sores of recent French history, exposing its continuing authoritarianism. "The Company Of Ghosts" won the Prix Novembre in France.
Avg Rating
3.42
Number of Ratings
130
5 STARS
17%
4 STARS
28%
3 STARS
38%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads
Author
Lydie Salvayre
Author · 10 books
Lydie Salvayre is a French writer. Born in the south of France to Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, she went on to study medicine in Toulouse and continues to work as a practicing psychiatrist. She has been awarded both the Prix Hermes and the Prix Novembre for her work. She won the Prix Goncourt 2014 for her novel Pas Pleurer.
