Title: Attachment
Author: Florence Noiville
Translated by: Teresa Lavender Fagan
Publisher: Seagull Books
ISBN: 9780857422330
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages:128
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5
A young girl and an older man fall in love. She is all of seventeen – not yet an adult. He is close to fifty and her professor. She loves him and he loves her. He is but obviously married and that is how the novella is played out – between the two – not to forget her daughter, who after years is trying to make sense of her mother’s life, her affair and what love really is in the larger scheme of things – if it is anything at all.
“Attachment” by Florence Noiville is a stunner of a novella. It is epistolary – letters written by Marie (which her daughter chances upon) to her lover H and that is how the novella opens to the reader.
The book explores the obsessive nature of love – how it can resurrect you and how it can ruin you completely. It is also about that one thing inside of us that makes us attached to people whom we shouldn’t have approached to begin with.
The writing is crisp and to the point and that is what I guess any reader will love first and appreciate about the book. The book doesn’t go on and on without any end. To a very large extent, credit must also be given to the beautiful translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan and the ability with which, the translation is able to stick true to the aesthetics to the original – or so it seems, given the flow and the meanings that emerge.
“Attachment” to me is an immensely powerful novella – that very skillfully manages to integrate pasts and presents of people alive and dead. Honestly I would give this book to anyone who has ever been in love or is in love as of now, just for the poetry of prose that it has to present.
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