{"id":7727,"date":"2018-12-06T06:59:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T06:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7727"},"modified":"2018-12-11T12:38:25","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T12:38:25","slug":"lullaby-by-leila-slimani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7727","title":{"rendered":"Lullaby by Le\u00efla Slimani"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/strong>Translated by Sam Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Faber & Faber UK\/Penguin US<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Le\u00efla Slimani\u2019s unsettling and exceptionally clever second novel (first published in France under the title Chanson Douce<\/em> and currently in the US as The Perfect Nanny<\/em>) won the illustrious Prix Goncourt in 2016.\u00a0 You can see why.\u00a0 It is a story of derangement, rooted in the familiar but subverting expectations.\u00a0 A thriller of a most unusual kind, it looks at the life of a working mother in Paris, who takes the risk of asking another woman to look after her children.\u00a0 The book open with the murder of both the children.\u00a0 In short, it is a horror story.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At first, every word of this tale rings true.\u00a0 The mother, Myriam, a talented French-Moroccan lawyer, is not sure how to tell her unsympathetic husband, Paul, that, despite her hopes and best intentions, she feels as if her children are \u2018eating her alive\u2019 (\u2018sometimes she wanted to scream like a lunatic in the street…she felt as if she were dying\u2019).\u00a0 The reader feels for this woman, who is finding motherhood much harder and lonelier than she had expected, and whose husband initially ridicules her professional ambition.\u00a0 They decide to hire someone, setting aside one single Saturday afternoon to find the right person.\u00a0 The woman they choose is Louise, a white working-class Parisian with a glowing reference from her previous employer.<\/p>\n

From here on, the reader is invited to watch, appalled, as the question, \u2018What is the perfect nanny?\u2019 is asked and answered.\u00a0 So thrilled are the Masses that they don\u2019t stop to ask themselves why this servant of theirs, who so delights their children with her inexhaustible games and fairy tales, has all the time in the world to keep their apartment cleaner than it has ever been before, to work all hours, even to cook fantastic food for their dinner parties.\u00a0 Myriam goes back to work, unaware of the \u2018black lake\u2019 inside her employee.<\/p>\n

For Louise has her own hinterland, just like anyone else. \u00a0It involves huge debt racked up by a dead partner, a dismal bedsit, single-parenthood, a delinquent daughter who has gone missing.\u00a0 That it also includes a medical diagnosis of \u2018delirious melancholia\u2019 is the Masses\u2019 bad luck.<\/p>\n

Intimations of madness, of dangerous involvement and detachment, appear very early in the narrative, but the real Louise is invisible to her employers.\u00a0 The reader watches, aghast, as this hapless woman falls to pieces while in charge of someone else\u2019s children. \u00a0In calm, steady, devastating prose, Slimani tracks the daily life of this sample urban nanny, both at home in the Masses\u2019 flat and out in the city.\u00a0 There are searing scenes in the park (where Louise moves trancelike among other nannies from all over the world), evoking the compromises required by poverty, the solidarity of the underdog and the bleak routines of the lonely and marginalized\u00a0 –\u00a0 \u2018lives that will never be recorded\u2019. \u00a0There are scenes of atrocious insensitivity, as when the Masses and their friends discuss property prices and expensive holidays in front of Louise, who is also expected to put up with their sexual tactlessness when they take her on one of those holidays.\u00a0 They just have no inkling of Louise\u2019s descent into hell, as she thinks that \u2018soon\u2026she will be on the street\u2026she will shit in the street, like an animal.\u2019<\/p>\n

In short, this is a powerful novel on many levels, asking questions about parenting, race, class, luck and identity.\u00a0 From the children to the investigating police officer, no-one escapes the central fact that every single one of us has an inner life and that we ignore this at our peril.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

* A 2018 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Intimations of madness, of dangerous involvement and detachment, appear very early in the narrative, but the real Louise is invisible to her employers. The reader watches, aghast, as this hapless woman falls to pieces while in charge of someone else\u2019s children. In calm, steady, devastating prose, Slimani tracks the daily life of this sample urban nanny, both at home in the Masses\u2019 flat and out in the city. There are searing scenes in the park (where Louise moves trancelike among other nannies from all over the world), evoking the compromises required by poverty, the solidarity of the underdog and the bleak routines of the lonely and marginalized […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7727"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8069,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7727\/revisions\/8069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}