A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Dominique Barberis: book review

A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray (2019) is set in a suburb, Ville d’Avray, at the edge of Paris.

The narrator visits her older sister Claire Marie in Ville-d’Avray, where Claire Marie lives with her physician husband Christian and daughter Melanie. The sisters don’t see each other all that often. Months and months would go by, but today they catch up. It is a Sunday. The narrator’s husband Luc doesn’t like going to Ville-d’Avray, so he stays home.

Sundays are important in their family. From childhood, it was always a special day. The narrator begins with her recollections of places she went with her sister in their youth; food they ate, games they played – their imaginations and fantasies.

The sisters were romantics in their youth. Claire Marie had literary lovers, while the narrator loved her Latin teacher. Claire Marie had a habit of ‘spending long periods of time at the window, doing nothing.’ That’s because, she said, ‘On Sundays, you think about life.’

On this Sunday, the narrator is full of memories as she drives to visit her sister. On this Sunday, Claire Marie is also full of memories. Fifteen years prior, while married to Christian, she tells her sister about an ‘encounter’ with a mysterious foreign man.

This is a disquieting novel of confidences and secrets, the hopes for another life or of ‘something else’ – and the dangers of desire.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), 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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