The People in the Photo (Eux sur la
photo 2011, English edition 2014) is an epistolary fictional novel set in
England, France, and Switzerland from March 2007 to April 2008. The entire
narrative is seen through the correspondence (letters and email) between two
people.
The original photograph is two men and a woman ‘bathed in sunlight’ in
their tennis gear in Interlaken, Switzerland, in the summer of 1971. The woman
is the narrator Helene Hivert’s mother Nathalie. Helene, who works at the
Museum of the History of the Postcard in Paris as head of the pre-1930 visual
artefacts collection, is 39 years old and this is the first time she has seen
the face of her mother. Her mother died when she was four years old, and her
father remarried Sylvia who adopted and raised her. They never mentioned her
mother, and now Sylvia has Alzheimer’s and her father has been dead for three
years. So she can’t ask them about the photograph she has found.
One of the men in the photo is P. Crusten. The other man is unnamed. Who is
he? Where is her father Michel?
Pierre Crusten’s son, Stephane, a biologist working in England, responds to
Helene’s advertisement to find the unnamed man. Pierre says it is Jean Pamiat,
now frail and in a retirement home in Lausanne.
Stephane is curious too about his father. What was he doing in the summer
of 1971? Together, in a series of correspondences, Helene and Pierre seek to
know more about their family – Helene about her mother, and Stephane about his father.
She sifts through her father’s photos and books, and he returns to Geneva where
his brother Philippe lives, to look through his father’s boxes of photos. The
correspondence brings them closer and closer together.
Helene learns that her mother’s maiden name is Nataliya Olegovna Zabvina.
She can’t understand why the past has been hidden from her, and why she has
been raised with lies.
When two almost identical photographs surface at almost the same time ‘when
they had been lying forgotten for forty years in two different places, so far
from each other’ they are closer to the truth. Helene discovers ‘the intensity
of my father’s hatred or indifference towards my mother.’ She also learns how
her mother died.
But it is not until two critical letters emerge that they know the full
truth: photographs and a letter of explanation from Sylvia before her death,
and a letter from Jean Pamiat. ‘Thirty years of censorship overturned by 110
photos in an album.’
Several of these early black and white family photos mentioned in the story
are described in detail – the position of the people, their clothes, their
expression, the landscape – but the photographs are not provided. Readers see
only what the narrator, Helene, sees.
For people who like epistolary novels, this is a gradual evolution of
friendship and truth about family secrets, moving from deception to painful
reality. For me, some of the threads were too neatly tied together and the
ending too informative and revealing – and too sentimental. But overall, it is
a slow-burn detective-type unearthing of clues that clash then blend in a
mixture of revelations and surprises.
Parts of the Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas and Maggie Smith movie My
Old Lady (2014) set in Paris came to mind – The People in the Photo is similar
in tone, pace, themes, and narrative, but without the humour.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
Comments
Post a Comment