The Birthday Party

A painter contends with the ghosts of the French countryside in a psychological literary thriller by a major French writer. An eccentric Parisian artist moves to La Bassée, a hamlet in the French countryside, to work on her paintings in peace. The town has only three other inhabitants: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm, his wife, Marion, and their daughter, Ida. When the artist receives an anonymous poison-pen letter in the mail--and then another one, delivered by hand--she wonders who would wish to disturb her and the village's peace. Over the course of the novel, Mauvignier follows these four characters' lives, telescoping from broad landscapes to gauzy recollections, building toward a menacing finish. Written in rhythmic prose that doubles back as it traverses time, The Birthday Party asks whether we can ever escape our past--whether, in its attention to the minutiae of daily life, such a thing as a quiet life exists. As the artist works to exorcise obsessions through her paintings, and her neighbors are revisited by past decisions, we understand that even a place long "destined to languish, a world uniquely fated to narrow," has a history they must contend with. The Birthday Party is the magnum opus by a major French writer.