Anne Pitteloud turns literary impersonation into a thriller with «Fille de»
The Swiss critic and author follows her 2016 story collection with a novel about a daughter, a silenced father and a scheme that spirals beyond her control.
Anne Pitteloud, a literary critic at Le Courrier, has published a new novel, Fille de, described by Le Temps as tense as a thriller and built around writing and identity theft. It follows En plein vol, a collection of short stories she published with D'autre part in 2016.
The book opens on a funeral. Christian Monnay became, in only two novels, a 'great writer' in the 1980s, then spent thirty years in silence, writing daily in the dovecote of his house without ever publishing again, according to Le Temps. He dies taking the reasons for that silence with him.
His daughter, the novel's narrator, grew up in the cult of this famous father and fled the oppressive household as soon as she could. At his death, she is drawn into a scheme larger than herself, one that uses writing to make a dead man speak again. Le Temps describes a woman seeking her own voice who believes she is stepping into the light while in fact erasing herself further, in a novel where the literary world becomes a theatre of shadows and false appearances.
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