No and Me

Is it weird to want to read a novel because the author has such a beautiful name? :) That is what happened when I first saw No and Me by Delphine de Vigan. Delphine, isn't that a lovely first name?

Delphine de Vigan is a well-known, but new to me, French author of several novels. No and Me is the first of her books to be translated into English. It is a story of Lou Bertignac, a highly intelligent, thirteen-year-old Parisian loner, whose mother is suffering from severe depression because of something tragic that has happened in the family. Lou likes to escape her life by wandering on Gare d'Austerlitz railway station. There she meets a few years older homeless girl, who calls herself No. Lou decides to make No the subject of her class project and little by little she gets No talking about her life. After the project is finished No suddenly disappears. Lou is heartbroken and keeps looking for No. When she asks her parents if No could come and live with them, her parents unexpetedly say yes. Lou finally finds No and takes her home. Trying to help a young woman who has been severely neglected and hurt might, however, prove to be more that the Bertignacs bargained for.

No and Me tells many stories. It is a book about being an outsider, about homelessness and neglect, how parents can let their children down in many different ways, but it is also a book about friendship, healing and trust. I loved the character of Lou. She reminded me very much of another young, intelligent girl in another French novel, namely Paloma Josse in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, though Lou did not have any suicidal thoughts. I also loved the mixture of maturity and innocence in Lou. She is very capable of many things, but as a narrator she does not understand everything she sees, and the adult reader becomes very aware of this along the way, especially after No's life takes a turn for the worse again.

No and Me was originally published in France in 2007 as No et moi. It was translated into English by George Miller. In 2008 the French original won the prestitious Booksellers' Prize in France.

No and Me was a joy to read. Despite the fact that it deals with difficult subjects like homelessness and loss it was not a hard book to read. Quite the opposite. I could hardly wait to finish it, because I wanted to know what happens to all the characters and how the story ends. The writer with the beautiful name did not dissapoint. :) This was a very well rounded novel. The ending was just "like the point on top of the letter i" as the saying goes in my native Finnish, meaning it was pretty perfect. :)

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I've been reading some new Finnish literature lately. A few days ago I finished a funny, little book about an 80-something old man who complained about nearly everything. Every chapter started with ""Well, it really hurt my feelings, when..." One of the best one's was when he really hurt his feelings when the sun was shining! :) The book is an absolute gem! We celebrated Father's Day here yesterday and I bought the book as a gift for my Dad. It will be interesting to hear what he thinks about the book.

Now I'm reading another interesting Finnish novel. It tells about a young woman who converts to the Hare Krishna religion. It is said to be a poetical story about the difficulties of trying to remember the childhood before the religious convertion and the pain and joy of becoming an adult, finding one's sexual identity and the right to feel pleasure. I'm really enjoying this novel, too. I guess I might soon have to change my mind about Finnish literature being mostly -dare I say this- boring. :) (I do think that all too many Finnish novels tend to move on very dark waters: depression, alcohol problems, abuse etc. and that kind of books don't usually interest me. No and Me talks about depression and abuse, but the book itself is not depressing or dark at all.)

I'm not sure if I'll have time for another post this week. We'll see. I'll be in Vienna next weekend, so maybe I'll have some nice pictures to share with you after that. Happy reading everyone!