Today I’m beyond thrilled to be part of the blog tour for Vanda by Marion Brunet on behalf of Random Things Tours. Thanks to Bitter Lemon Press and Anne Cater for the copy of this book for today’s honest and unbiased review.
Set in Marseilles, this is the story of Vanda, a beautiful woman in her thirties, arms covered in tats, skin so dark that some take her for a North African. Devoted to her six-year-old son Now, they live in a derelict shed by the beach. She had wanted to be an artist; she is now a cleaner in a psychiatric hospital. But Vanda is happy living alone with her boy. ‘The two of them against the world’, as she says. Everything changes when Simon, the father of her son, surfaces in Marseilles. He had left Vanda seven years earlier, not knowing that she was pregnant. When Simon demands custody of his son, Vanda’s suppressed rage threatens to explode. The tension becomes unbearable, both parents fully capable of extreme violence.
Whenever I see a Bitter Lemon Press blog tour invitation, I always reply so fast! BLP translated fiction books are amongst my favourites. Vanda is yet another excellent release from this publisher.
Marion Brunet has written such a deep, dark and atmospheric novel with Vanda. From the second I began reading I was hooked, nothing could tear me away from Vanda for too long. I was captivated until I read the last line in this book.
Told from the points of view of Vanda and Simon, two very different people with totally different ways off life. Vanda lives in Marseille,and she is so poor she lives in a shack by the Sea that can become flooded at times too. She is a cleaner at the psychiatric hospital and she struggles to collect her son, Noé, from school. He is all she has and she does what she can.
Noé’s father,Simon, turns up and discovers he has a son. Vanda kept her pregnancy from him when they split up. Now he wants to get to know his son Vanda feels that everything is changing and maybe not for the good.
Vanda is a story in which the characters, except for Noé, aren’t very likable. Vanda is so damaged from her past that she does her best for her child but is such a contradiction as she puts her own needs first for the majority of the time. She smothers him but on the other hand does not really care for him correctly. It’s the only way she is able to function the reader can see this. The amount of misery in her past and the abuse she suffered has marked her psyche and we see this clearly.
As I said Vanda is a hard character to feel sorry for, but the way she is treated, the unfairness and the abuse she experiences do make you want to cry and scream at what, or who allows this? This is almost a tragedy that the emotions pour from these pages, dragging the reader in right up to their neck. Such a sublime character study of a tragic woman.
I have not read Marion Brunet’s other book, but Vanda has made me want go to find the first book. This author doesn’t hold back in her writing. Vanda is a snapshot of society today and the people in it. Every reader will have their own opinion on this book dependant on their own viewpoints.
The translation of Vanda is so good you would think it was written with English as a first language. Katherine Gregor translations skills have made sure nothing is lost in translation. Every nuance, every emotion is there, just pouring from the pages.
This book is so much of a stark portrait that it rings truth as you read. This ensures the reader cannot put this book down. I found it almost like something akin to a hypnotic hold. A triumph of a book, I definitely say if you like translated fiction novels that pulls no punches, pick Vanda up.
About the Author
Marion Brunet, born in 1976 in the Vaucluse, is a well-known Young Adult and Literary Fiction author in France. Her YA novels have received over 30 prizes, including the 2017 UNICEF Prize for Youth Literature. “Vanda” is her second novel to be translated into English, after the success of “Summer of Reckoning” in 2020.
sharonbeyondthebooks.uk 