Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the French by Emma Ramadan

This is a splendidly strange fable of a working family’s life as told through the eyes of a child.
The style Garréta’s writing is the highlight, a sort of mix of poetry, wordplay, puns and tricks with grammar. To provide the opportunity she needs for her endeavours, that she uses a 12 year old girl as narrator works perfectly.

There’s a ten page afterword from Emma Ramadan, the translator, which goes someway to explain how she managed to reproduce it in English, a feat indeed.

The father of the family receives a concrete mixer for his birthday, which changes his life. He wants to ‘muddernize’, or modernise their basic house, but has few DIY skills. Not surprisingly a series of mishaps ensue; he is temporarily blinded by falling dust and mice droppings, he and his daughters receive a shocking zap of electricity by faulty wiring. While pouring a concrete for a floor, the narrator’s younger sister, Poulette, not her real name, finishes up covered in wet concrete.
It’s compelling, and very humorous.

Garréta Is from the Oulipo literary school, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, Raymond Queneau was a finding member in the 1960s. In fact, a very apt summary of the book is given by Ramadan in her afterword, as Zazie In The Concrete.

We sent him back on the road to his hamlet. Cause he’d lost his way, the sad hepatic antiseptized and iodized idiot. He kept heading down the alley to the Castle, as if intent on going for a bath in the manure pit of the former Crusaders. We didn’t take him prisoner cause we hate captivity more than anything. If to live vanquished and without glory is to die each day, to live as a captive is to teem like a dead rat in the rank moat of time.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5