The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain

Dining alone in an elegant Parisian brasserie, accountant Daniel Mercier can hardly believe his eyes when President François Mitterrand sits down to eat at the table next to him.

Daniel’s thrill at being in such close proximity to the most powerful man in the land persists even after the presidential party has gone, which is when he discovers that Mitterrand’s black felt hat has been left behind.

After a few moments’ soul-searching, Daniel decides to keep the hat as a souvenir of an extraordinary evening. It’s a perfect fit, and as he leaves the restaurant Daniel begins to feel somehow … different.

Goodreads Description

I bought this little gem on impulse. It was one of those reduced price kindle offers and I thought I hadn't reviewed many French books on this blog (a couple I think), so I took a punt. 

The hat at the heart of the story passes from owner to new owner by a series of coincidences and each time the new owner changes his or her life, becoming more decisive and taking control of circumstances. Is this because of the hat? Daniel Mercier thinks so: his search for the hat he lost shortly after acquiring it ties the two ends of the novel together. But we are never told whether the hat has magical properties. Just as dressing up in your finest clothes makes you stand taller, it could simply be that the action of wearing this rather superior hat makes its recipients reach into themselves and find the resolve they have been lacking. 

The President's Hat is a positive, life-affirming read. Each of the hat's recipients has lost their way - one is a young woman in a relationship with a married man that is going nowhere, another is a perfume maker who has lost his creativity, and the last is a member of the conservative aristocracy who throws over his conservatism to become a patron of the arts. I suspect that there is some clever commentary on French society and the changes Mitterand wrought in it, but it was lost to me. The book is obviously very French and set in a time (the 1980s) which already seems very distant. 

The President's Hat is a short book with an easy-to-read style and so can be read in one session, but you will probably find yourself thinking about it afterwards. It raises some interesting philosophical questions - about how a chance occurrence can have big consequences, about power and its transfer and of course about how we can change our circumstances.

I will keep my eye on those kindle daily deals, if this book is anything to go by.

The Threads of the Heart by Carole Martinez

They say Frasquita knows magic, that she is a healer with occult powers, that perhaps she is a sorcerer. She does indeed possess a remarkable gift, one that has been passed down to the women in her family for generations. From rags, off-cuts, and rough fabric she can create gowns and other garments so magnificent, so alive, that they are capable of masking any kind defect or deformity (and pregnancies!). They bestow a breathtaking and blinding beauty on whoever wears them.

But Fasquita's gift makes others in her small Andalusian village jealous. And to make matters worse, Frasquita is an adulteress (it matters not that her betrayal came at her husband's behest after he gambled on her honor, and lost, at a cock fight). She is hounded and eventually banished from her home. What follows is an extraordinary adventure as she travels across southern Spain all the way to Africa with her five children in tow. Her exile becomes a quest for a better life, for herself and her daughters, whom she hopes can escape the ironclad fate of her family of sorcerers.

Goodreads description

This debut book by Carole Martinez was first published to much acclaim in France, it is now available in an English translation by Howard Curtis.

There are obvious parallels between this book and One Hundred Years of Solitude, something which the publisher points out in its publicity. It is a story of a family and is full of the sort of magic that we are familiar with in Marquez's masterpiece: Fasquita's daughters possess magic powers - one can stir up revolution with the beauty of her singing, another emits a heavenly light, another can give the kiss of death. Death herself appears as a beautiful woman. Fasquita's husband goes mad and goes to live in the chicken house and the child that is born afterwards has white feathers. 

But this is unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude in so far as it is the story of women. As the narrator, Frasquita's youngest daughter, states: Since Genesis and the beginning of books, men have slept with History. But there are other stories. Subterranean stories conveyed in the secrets of women, tales buried in the ears of daughters, sucked in with mothers' milk, words drunk from mothers' lips. In that statement we see the true intention of the author: to write epic magic realism about women. Book One of the novel opens with Frasquita being initiated into a family rite on the occasion of her first menstruation, and like all the women in her family she receives an heirloom - a box containing her destiny. She is not allowed to open it for nine months, when she does she finds it contains reels of thread and and other sewing equipment and with it her magical powers. 

In this book the feminine magic is linked to faith, in particular Catholicism. The family rite includes prayer and later Frasquita restores her child to life using the power of prayer. Early on there is an incident where Frasquita makes a heart for the statue of the Madonna. Questioned by the priest Frasquita says Yes, I don't understand why nobody did it before. She was so empty. Was it men who tore out her heart? In other magic realist books, particularly those from the Americas we have seen the European faith contrasted with the older indigenous magic, not so here.

Many of the men in the book are either fools or predators - such as the creepy paedophile doctor Eugenio or Jose, Frasquita's foolish husband. And there seems to be a common theme of men pursuing the impossible without regard to the others around them: Jose's whose obsession with cockfighting and then bareknuckle fighting makes him willing to risk his family home, wife and later his son or the anarchists Frasquita meets on her journey. And yet the women in the book are bound by custom and duty to stand by their foolosh men in this patriarchal society. The old midwife cannot bring herself to betray Eugenio, even though she knows of what he is capable, and Frasquita accepts the consequences of Jose's gambling. But at last Frasquita does break away and sets off on a quest, which becomes as obsessive as any man's, all the more so because it seems to have no end.

As in Marquez's work and that of Isabel Allende, with whom this book has also been compared, Martinez uses magic realism to tackle difficult subjects -  child abduction/murder, the atrocities of war, and of course the status of women. She also has a lyrical style which conjures up strong images - the desert landscape, Frasquita's wondrous sewing and at times the horror of man's cruelty: The people were roaring beneath the child’s voice, and the captain was asking his questions, and the guard was cutting Salvador’s face, gashing the cheeks, digging into the lines, attacking the muscle, widening the mouth, carving the features.

In Frasquita Martinez has drawn a wonderful central character. In fact her characters, in particular the women, seem to me to have a greater depth than Marquez's. A problem arises from this strength. Eighty per cent of the book has Frasquita at its heart, she is to use a suitable phrase the central thread of the book around which the other threads are woven. However she is absent from the last fifth of the book and the story focuses instead on the fates of her daughters. With the central thread gone, I felt that the story unravelled and lost focus. 

That criticism aside this novel heralds the arrival of a major magic realism writer. I look forward to Carole Martinez's next novel.

I was given this book by the publisher in return for an unbiased review.

by Zoe Brooks