Showing results by author "Stephanie Smee - translator" in All Categories

Meet Patience Portefeux, 53, an underpaid Franco-Arab judicial interpreter for the Ministry of Justice who specialises in telephone tapping. Widowed after the sudden death of her husband, Patience is now wedged between university fees for her two grown-up daughters and nursing home costs for her ageing mother. She’s laboured for 25 years to keep everyone’s heads above water.

Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire.

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - opens Berlin's very first French bookshop. It is a dream come true. The bookshop attracts artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets - even the French ambassador himself. It brings Françoise peace, friendship and prosperity. Then one summer's day in 1939, the dream ends. It ends after Kristallnacht, when Jewish shops and businesses are smashed to pieces. It ends when no one protests. So, just weeks before the war breaks out, Françoise flees to France.