Anne-Sophie Subilia turns a newborn's first months into a novel of everyday intensity
In "Glissando," the Swiss author follows the arrival of a baby into a family already shaped by a four-year-old son, continuing the close attention to daily life that marked her earlier novel "L'Épouse."
Anne-Sophie Subilia's new novel, "Glissando," opens just after Béa has given birth to Gabrielle, according to Le Temps. Béa and her partner Martijn already have a four-year-old son, Jan, and the book stays close to the confined, domestic spaces of the following weeks and months: the bedroom, the living room, skin against skin.
The title refers to the musical term for a continuous slide from one note to another, as a human voice can produce naturally, Le Temps notes. The word also evokes gliding through days and through life, rising at times and coming back down, only to glide again.
According to the paper, Subilia writes with an attentiveness compared to a sonar detecting what forms beneath the surface of the ordinary, treating the seemingly banal texture of daily life as the true center of her characters' existence, where the smallest and largest things in a life meet.
The novel follows "L'Épouse," which won the Prix suisse de littérature and was selected for the Femina and Médicis prizes, Le Temps reports. That earlier book was set in the isolation of an ICRC delegate's wife posted in Gaza in the 1970s, already marked by close attention to micro-events and to tiny shifts in perception. With "Glissando," Le Temps writes, Subilia sharpens that same focus on another kind of journey, one that unfolds almost entirely at home.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
