2024/062: Cursed Bread — Sophie Mackintosh

2024/062: Cursed Bread — Sophie Mackintosh

...there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you. [loc. 520]

The setting is a small French town in the Fifties. Elodie, the baker's wife, has 'murdered [her] marriage with familiarity': love has evaporated, as has all excitement, and Elodie's life is an endless round of clothes-washing with the other women at the town's lavoir, of working in the bakery, of petty gossip and a sense that nothing will ever change.

Into this postwar bleakness comes glamorous Violet and her husband 'the ambassador', who claims to have come to conduct 'a government project, a kind of survey'.( Read more... )