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April 15, 2024

Book tip: "Together you are less alone" by Anna Gavalda

Sometimes I feel richly gifted with life. This is especially true for the moments when I lie stretched out on the bed, my fiancee sitting with a pillow in the back next to me and read to me. Depending on how busy we both are, this occurs (maximum) daily until (minimal) once a week. Gorgeous, any TV program can be stolen from me.

A compartment in our bookshelf is reserved only for the books read by her and last week it was full. As much as I squeezed and squeezed, the good 550-page novel? Together, you're less alone? Anna Gavalda just did not fit in anymore. Now the book is here on my desk, waiting for us to empty the bookshelf to set up a new section of the read books. This is the opportunity to take it in your hand again, leaf through it and write a reading recommendation for you. Here we go!

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A solid story arc, which carries the story from its beginning to the end, does not offer the novel in the true sense. Action-determining are rather the four main characters, whose inner and outer experience Anna Gavalda devotes extensively. Episodic passages depict the slow approach of four fundamentally different characters. The nice thing is that these four people do not tear each other into dramatic abysses, but mutually support and straighten up.

First there is the 36-year-old Philibert Jehan Louis-Marie Georges Marquet de la Durbellières, whose name in the novel is graciously shortened to Philibert. He comes from an impoverished noble family whose members are mutually victorious. Philibert is sensitive and highly intelligent, but does not really get along with the practical side of life. Although he has studied and a? Historical genius? is, he denies his living by selling postcards. At the beginning of the novel, he is on his father's behalf, the 300-square-foot apartment of his recently deceased grandmother.

One room of the apartment is occupied by Philibert's friend Franck. He is a cook and the exact opposite of Philibert: loud, rude and at the bottom of his heart only interested in sex and motorcycles. However, he always spends the only day off the week with his 83-year-old grandmother Paulette, who has to move to a nursing home after a fractured femoral neck.

The fourth person in this uneven quartet is 26-year-old Camille. She lives in a shabby, cold studio apartment under the roof of the house and eats as little as a sparrow. Although she is a very talented draftsman, she has to go clean at night to survive.

When Camille falls ill, Philibert brings the unknown to him in his apartment and cared for her. This event is the real catalyst of the story and relationship networks between the participants begin to develop. As Philibert, Franck and Camille decide Paulette from the nursing home to get into the apartment, the unequal WG is complete. Where this situation develops, I will not reveal at this point. Only so much: it is magical, beautiful and touching at the same time. In countless, well-written dialogues, an interhuman story of great intensity develops, which fortunately never falls into kitschy.

To the author

Anna Gavalda was born in 1970 near Paris. With a total circulation of over 5 million, she is now one of the most successful writers in France. Her first fame came with her stories published in 1999. I wish someone would wait for me somewhere. Anna Gavalda gave up after this success, her job as a French teacher in a private school, to devote himself entirely to the letter. Her novel, published in 2005, is less alone stormed the French bestseller lists and was filmed successfully with Audrey Tautou (The Fabulous World of Amélie) in the role of Camille. Today Anna Gavalda lives with her two children on a farm near Paris. She writes for Elle magazine, but does not read newspapers herself and does not own a radio or a television.