Separation - Hardcover

Franck, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679424539 ISBN 13: 9780679424536

Publisher: Knopf, 1994

Synopsis

His first clue comes when his wife stops holding his hand in public. The second comes when she starts avoiding him at home. After the clues comes the certainty: his wife is in love with another man. After that, the only question is when she will leave him -- and whether he will drive her to it.

A bestseller in France, this cruel, tender, and emotionally explosive novel reimagines the breakup of a marriage with a compassion that is all the more piercing for its understatement. And although the setting is unmistakably Paris, this vision of the blistering loss of love transcends all boundaries.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

ue comes when his wife stops holding his hand in public. The second comes when she starts avoiding him at home. After the clues comes the certainty: his wife is in love with another man. After that, the only question is when she will leave him -- and whether he will drive her to it.<br><br>A bestseller in France, this cruel, tender, and emotionally explosive novel reimagines the breakup of a marriage with a compassion that is all the more piercing for its understatement. And although the setting is unmistakably Paris, this vision of the blistering loss of love transcends all boundaries.<br><br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>

Reviews

"Separation" seems too benign a word for the excruciating psychological torment the narrator undergoes during the breakup of his seven-year marriage. In a process that starts at a performance of The Tempest when his wife takes her hand from his, the narrator's sense of self and security are peeled away layer by layer until, four and a half months later, he is stripped of wife, two young children and his Paris home. The nameless narrator, his wife and their numerous friends were all "children of May '68" who have slipped into a life of comfortable affluence and liberal rhetoric. When his wife cools to him and then admits that she is infatuated with another man, he is determined to be understanding and reasonable in order to keep his family together. Soon he realizes that the other man is merely a symptom of a deeper malaise and the narrator's noblesse dissipates into petty jealousies, betrayals and his induction as a "Knight of the Order of Valium." He clings to his five-year-old "First Child," hoping to stave off the loss that followed his parents' divorce. Every detail in this terse poetic narrative hits home: "She slips past him in the hallways, goes through doors ahead of him, calls their bedroom 'my' bedroom and the children 'my' children . . ." French writer Franck dedicates Separation to his children; one can presume that such sad insight has been earned.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The thinly-charactered story of a marriage breaking up: a large bestseller in France. Nobody has names in this trendily streamlined narrative, but after seven years of marriage and two kids (known as ``the First Child'' and ``the Baby''), the wife announces to the husband that ``I've fallen in love with another man.'' The following ninety-five days are an extended kind of hell for the husband (a writer) as first he suffers deeply, then tries to win back the wife's affection (she claims she still loves him, although sex is a vanished thing), then swings into a high rage, then suffers still more deeply at the prospect of losing his children (``he goes out, drinks, smokes, snorts lines, smokes joints, screws. but every morning, inexorably, he comes back to his children's home''), then finally survives the separation, the wife getting the children. That there may well have been feeling, suffering, or pain in the origins of this tale isn't made the more compellingly believable by skin-deep people, disaster-struck metaphor (``He is on the bridge crossing the Seine when all at once the waters of the river and the waters of his tears collide''; ``He was completely unable to reconcile the external fires with the red lantern in whose glow he was wasting away''), or clumsy overreaching (``Fuck this society, he thought''). The translation can be uncommanding (``She wants to force me to look reality in the face''), though great care, admittedly, is taken with accuracy: ``His first film and his latest book were released at the same time, one in the theaters, the other in the bookstores.'' Says the publisher: ``350,000 copies sold in France. Soon to be published in eleven other countries.'' Zut! -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Tension mounts daily as a man and woman drift inexorably toward divorce. She is infatuated with the Other Man and cannot give him up; he is obsessed with his children and cannot give them up. The trench warfare of a marriage's destruction is waged with a vengeance whether in the couple's Paris apartment or among their friends. Every move is tactical, every word a missile aimed at the other's defenses. Franck brilliantly depicts the awful emotional experience of dying love, from its casual, willful beginning to its scorched-earth conclusion. His spare, evocative style succeeds in rendering this couple's demise with razor-sharp exactness that cuts to the core of emotion and exposes the futility and waste that awaits those who set out on such a course.
- Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a novel so deliberately timed and achingly sad that it has to be French, Dan Franck portrays the emotional and psychological trampoline of a couple's crumbling marriage. Franck's story is often stripped to bare emotion as one man, a writer living in Paris, watches his wife, infatuated with another man, move daily further away. At first he says nothing, hoping that she will return on her own accord. Then he tries pressure, then pulls away again, then takes the oldest of their two boys on an extended holiday that has her begging for their return. Back in Paris, she is even more cold to him than before. The writer, addicted to Valium by this point, goes through psychological torture as his wife begins to promise to leave, to move in with the other man, but won't make up her mind and stays. Finally, exhausted by his desire and inability to prevent it all from slipping away, he must make a decision of his own. Told with the emotional coolness that masks devastation, Franck's narrator is that voice in all of us, desperately trying to hold together what we know must fall apart. Excellent. David Cline

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679424539
• ISBN 13: 9780679424536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 227