Faces on the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano: book review

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue (2019) is a collection of stories about rural France.

The stories are about lakes and landscapes, daybreak and dusk, long roads and short cuts, construction and conservation, backwoods and open plains.

But mainly it’s about rural people. It’s about wedding guests, mothers, best friends, hitchhikers, storekeepers and so on.

I liked the story called ‘Glitter.’ The narrator, a woman, reads in the bathtub: ‘very hot baths and icy books ... I’m alive and I read real books.’ She finds glitter between the pages of a borrowed novel. She goes to the library to seek the source of the glitter owner. That’s not all she finds in borrowed library books—there is a ‘squashed fly, a feather marking a page, tiny pieces of bread, still fresh, or stale old breadcrumbs.’

The stories are about community and community spirit, but without intrusion—because we know little about the inner lives of the rural characters, only about their external realities. Solitary, outcast, in hermitude, nature protectionists, idealists, realists, fantasists, and naturalists—the juxtaposition of characters, their emotions, and lives makes this a collection of interest.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), 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).

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