Company of Ghosts

by Lydie Salvayre

When a bailiff turns up, a teenager tries to salvage her mother, their dignity and the TV. When a bailiff arrives at a housing project on the edge of Paris to draw up a routine inventory of goods in view of seizure, the reception he receives from Rose Melle and her teenage daughter is more than he has bargained for. Rose, forever unhinged by the trauma of childhood spent under Nazi occupation, mistakes him for a collaborationist thug and assails...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564783502
• ISBN13: 9781564783509
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 7.8"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Memories that Haunt may be real

This is an excellent novel about a mother and daughter living in France in the 1990's. The mother was a child during the Nazi occupation, was raped at age 6 and witnessed her family tortured and murdered by local thugs who became collaborators of the occupation. The mother suffers from a severe mental disorder (likely posttraumatic stress disorder) that has left her disabled. Her daughter is illegitimate from a liaison the mother had years after the war while in a mental institution. The daughter's life is 24-hour care of her disabled mother. The mother lives her life rapidly alternating between 1943 and the present and often mistakes people and current situations for her persecutors of that time. In the midst of this horrible situation, this family, living in poverty, is served with eviction and collection notices by a process server. For most of the book, the process server is a cardboard character, purposely left undeveloped, simply a literary device. He is real and the situation is serious, The unnamed process server proceeds to inventory the family's meager possessions. The daughter attempts to influence the process server by describing the history of her family, particularly her mother who frequently bursts on the scene from her bedroom cursing and accusing the process server of being a collaborator and working for the government of occupation. The daughter's explanations and accounts of her family and mother's violation under the occupation, persecutions and the mental and physical consequences of those horrors are revealed as the process server dispassionately and unmoved goes about his work. The author brings him into the narrative at intervals, subtly and in passing to remind us that he is there and as a reminder that the present is 1996 and not 1943. The process server responds neither in word nor deed to the horrible atrocities and aftermath that we know happened and haunt this family and household as so many ghosts of the past. His intrusion is seen as little different from that of the occupation forces and the corrupt thugs who posed as officials. The process server has come to collect possessions of value and is violating the family. The difference is that this process server is acting under the current law and does not act in any manner other to make a list of possessions of worth. As the daughter's narrative ends, there is a second part of the novel that consists of a lecture given by the process server to others in the field. He spends much time discussing the various reactions of the persons they may encounter, various shams and frauds that are attempted and gives dispassionate advice on how to deal with them. He recounts his interaction with the aforementioned family and describes the mother as an alcoholic who was deranged and delusional and the daughter as trying to seduce him. He acts as if the described atrocities were fiction. In a jarring and disturbing ending he expresses, again dispassionately, his disgust over the mot