A Swiss Life Told Through Books: Pierrette Frochaux's "Saute-ruisseau"

Pierrette Frochaux launches "Saute-ruisseau" on Thursday at the Forum de l'Hôtel de Ville in Lausanne, as part of an exhibition marking fifty years of the Editions d'en bas, according to Le Temps.

The book follows Faustine, a six-year-old city child sent to spend a summer on a farm in the Switzerland of the 1950s — a country untouched by war but still poor, where families did not go on holiday. Faustine finds a kind farm family and a village life full of small discoveries: gardens, tumbles in the hay, games in the grain silo. Le Temps notes the book also holds harder edges — a spanking meted out as a lesson when the child puts herself in danger, and an unsettling early exposure to adult sexuality that Faustine files away as a bad memory rather than a trauma, taking refuge instead in her first books.

A ten-year jump in the narrative brings Faustine to an apprenticeship as a bookseller, a choice that seems inevitable for a girl who always retreated into reading, even though she had once dreamed of becoming a pianist, a path out of reach for someone of her background. She lands in a bastion of Geneva's bourgeoisie, a rigidly hierarchical trade with strict rules — booksellers in neckties, trousers forbidden to the young women. Despite this, Le Temps reports, Faustine is happy there, dazzled by the sheer scale of knowledge shelved around her.

Frochaux herself went on to work as a bookseller and later as an archivist, and "Saute-ruisseau" traces that same arc from postwar countryside to the world of books, according to Le Temps.