The Safe House A Novel Christophe Boltanski Laura Marris Translation by Christophe Boltanski, Laura Marris (translation) 9780226449227, 022644922X instant download after payment.

When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife & walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray & lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat.

That house (& its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents & their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--& his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself.

The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 & won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness & an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.