Clémentine Mélois turns a breakup into an inventory of objects and memory

Clémentine Mélois's new novel, Choses que je croyais perdues, opens on a familiar dilemma: how does one properly empty an apartment after a breakup, with a brisk clean sweep or a wistful lingering over each object? According to Le Temps, the narrator, Emilie, must answer that question for herself as she packs up her belongings.

Emilie, the paper notes, throws nothing away, and every item she wraps in a box carries its own story, from a checked tea towel sewn by her grandmother to a CGT bottle opener that plays L'Internationale. As Mélois writes, quoted by Le Temps, "Ce sont les histoires qui font de nous ce que nous sommes [...] En se posant sur un caillou, l'histoire en fait une pierre précieuse." A pebble slipped into a pocket long ago, to remember a swim in the river Vecchio, becomes one such object: "souviens-toi."

Room by room, from the kitchen she loves most to the bathroom that leaves her cold, Emilie's finds pile up as she addresses a silent Tristan, who no longer answers, per the summary provided by Le Temps.

Le Temps frames the book within Mélois's broader talent for staging endings. The writer and visual artist recently made a noisy exit from the Oulipo group, which she had come to find tiresome, in part, the paper says, over the persistently thin presence of women more than sixty years after its founding. Since the group's rules allow departure during one's lifetime only through a mock suicide performed before a notary, Mélois obliged, complete with theatrical props and a legal representative's declaration that the pretend suicide took full effect. Le Temps also points to her earlier book, Alors c'est bien, about bidding farewell to her artist father.