Kouchner adds, “My grandmother committed suicide shortly after.”
It’s the second funeral in the book – “a militant, heartbroken mob that had come to pay tribute to my grandmother’s freedom to commit suicide.” The suicide leaves Camille’s mother with an alcoholic shell. She drinks herself blind every night: “This is absolutely out of the question. It’s my freedom.”
The book is a sharply focused portrait of a certain kind of privileged French family of its day, first revolutionary and then bourgeois: their sexual mores, their thirst for power and fame, the collateral harm done to children. Her brother’s transgression is explained in one sentence in the middle of the book: “He started petting me, and then, you know…”
From this point on, the narrator’s voice ages as she understands what this means, and the book takes on aspects of a psychological thriller. The twins keep the secret a secret for years. Finally, fearing for the safety of their own children, strangled by a “hydra” of guilt and shame, they confide in other members of their family, to decidedly mixed reaction.
In fact, the book ends with the most mature voice of all, that of the law. Camille Kouchner addresses her stepfather directly and recites the text of the French penal code on incest. “Let’s be clear about this,” she writes:
Article 222—31—1 of the Criminal Code
Rape and sexual assault are classified as incestuous when committed by:
1) an ascendant;
2) a brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece;
3) or any other person, including a spouse or relative, who has legal or actual control over the victim.
Claire Berlinski is editor-in-chief of The Cosmopolitan Globalist. She lives in Paris.
THE FAMILIA GRANDE, by Camille Kouchner | Translated by Adriana Hunter | 214 pp. Other press. † $24.