Sunday is Gloomy...

The narrator begins by recounting a Sunday visit to her elder sister Claire Marie at her residence in a Parisian suburb Ville-d'Avray.  There her sister lives with her physician husband Christian and their daughter Mélanie. As the narration progresses, she remembers episodes from her childhood with her sister, spent in Brussels, suffused with dreams, longings, horrors, and their fancy and fondness—some of the childhood traits have found their way into their adult lives as well—for television or novel's character.

She characterizes her sister and her oddities, and is frank to share the discomfort she and her husband feel sometimes with her sister, and she is also well aware about the malaise Claire Marie feels because of them, which is often visible in her gesture and other ways. We find a psychological tension in this sisterly relation though everything seems fine between them; they have a sisterly resentment towards each other. Like a chorus to a beautiful but sad and gloomy song; here referral to Sunday² comes often, which is a day deeply rooted to the sister's childhood memories, and which sets a perfect tone to the story. Through the narrator's observation¹, the author has perfectly captured the mood, the silence, the seasonal transition, the stillness… like that of a perfectly composed art, of Parisian suburb; of Ville-d'Avray.

       1. AND SO I WAS FULL OF MEMORIES, I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost in Ville-d’Avray, by driving through the provincial, peaceful streets of my sister’s neighborhood, past private homes with their gleaming bay windows, their porches, their phony airs (Art Deco villa, Norman country house), their gardens planted with rosebushes and cedars.

2.On Sundays—don’t you think?—certain things come back to you more than on other days.”… she said, “On Sundays, you think about life.”

In their quiet conversation in the dusk, soon Claire Marie opts to tell the narrator about an episode in her life, when she'd an inexplicable relationship many years ago with a strange man named Marc Hermann—whom as a patient she'd met first time in her husband's clinic. In her confession, Claire Marie points that what started as an ordinary chance encounter, a way out to her routine life, soon became a mindless³ continuation, and ceased to become romantic and turned to a horrific compulsion she wanted to escape. The story continues, perfused with narrator's insight into her relation with her sister, all portrayed in the gripping ambience, with Claire Marie's description to what happened to the fate of the relation and the unshared horror it brought to her life.

As per the narrator, Claire Marie is a sensitive human being, easy to be a prey of mind games and tragic/romantic stories—which she collected from Marc Hermann's story of his Hungarian past. The narrator too is influenced by her sister, the way she feels the internal disquiet⁴ and dissatisfaction as if transferred from her sister. Something from the past influences them, something about the present unsettles⁵ them.

3.       Life’s like that: you make a valiant effort to carry your dreams, yours or those of others.

4.       That was why I resented my sister. That’s what’s so irritating about her. She rattles you.

5.       It was a remnant of childhood, I knew it. Our life with Rochester—my sister’s and mine—isn’t acceptable to anyone; our childhood isn’t acceptable to anyone. It weighs on us. But we can’t manage to get rid of it. It makes us exiles. I’ve tried to conceal it, I try to bluff. I try to appear liberated and modern (not an easy goal to accomplish, you have to admit, given the heavy burden of our upbringing on my sister and me). I’ve tried with all my strength to adjust.

The animated⁶ description of the stillness of the landscape in the narration is as such everything takes on life: the houses, the forest, the pond, the train stations… even the suspenseful rumors that circulate in the suburb about a strange man roaming in the locality.  In this recollection, we find a subtle psychological horror, a sisterly care⁷ and bond, strangeness of human emotion, imagined influences, a sensitive soul, a haunting echo of the childhood, nerves of loneliness, need for happiness and love… we are uplifted when things settle in the end. A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray fills us with hundreds of images to remember!

6. A damp autumn set in. You have to know what autumn’s like in Ville-d’Avray. October. November. In the hundreds of terraced gardens that rose in tiers up the slopes of the hills, the plants were turning brown, the trees were shedding their leaves. The rain started in the morning, stopped around noon, and resumed toward evening. The neighborhood seemed dead, the gardens perpetually darkened by the showers; the slate roofs glistened; the sodden leaves macerated in heaps. As soon as night fell, the wet asphalt reflected extensive yellow crowns of yet unfallen leaves. The same ruined, melancholy prospect was reproduced on every street, one by one. People went out less.

7.       I could practically see my sister strolling with her stranger in a setting composed of reflections, of beautiful trees, of leaves speckled with tiny light-colored patches, like eye floaters, as if the blurriness of dreams interposed itself between the image and the beholder (which is always the case with Corot)… I felt anger toward that man. Because he took advantage of the situation; because he understood nothing about my sister.

Author: Dominique Barbéris

Translator: John Cullen

Publisher: Other Press

Author's Photo Source: Maurice Rougemont

Review Copy Courtesy: Other Press