'Dysfunctional' is the adjective that designates the family of Fifi, the narrator. A Kabyle father, bar owner and intermittent convict; a Polish mother who will never get over the Nazi camps she miraculously survived, former prostitute and ultimately patient in a psychiatric hospital: the adjective is surely not usurped. In this family of seven children, Fidèle or Fifi (Fidèle means faithful) chooses to tell the story of this weird childhood in a lively style; she will say what she wants, in the order she selects. She will also decide not to write about what she doesn’t want to disclose, and that is even more impressive. The reader has no choice but to follow Fifi without hesitation in this itinerary of a girl who's at risk of getting lost a hundred times. "Even with something that everyone thought useless, we can do something wonderful": Old Zaza speaks like this of the French toast her granddaughter feasts on and this pattern sheds light on this great novel. If Axl Cendres speaks here much better than most of addiction to alcohol, the difficulty of leaving one's environment, of these large families where there is love but not for all, above all she gives us an extraordinary novel about love: the unsinkable love of the father for the mother; the love of Fidèle for Sarah - and the fact that it's a homosexual love really doesn't matter, and that is not the least of the qualities of this novel. A bright masterpiece, unsettling and energizing.
