Tache de Ne Pas Devenir Folle [French]

By Schneider-V

In Vanessa Schneider's family, one woman always seems to hide another. So, following on from La m re de ma m re, she now explores the strange fate of her father's mother.
When Oh dies, her grandchildren lose someone they knew only as the old woman they visited regularly in her care home in Sain-Maur. A grandmother whose wise exterior hid the fact that she had once been the terrible Marthe, the central pillar to a "family of nutcases".
After her funeral an icon is passed down, via her son, to her granddaughter. It is a painting traditionally handed from mother to daughter, and this break with family tradition is only a continuation of a long series of fractures. What secrets does this precious object harbour?
Oh -Marthe leaves behind a lineage blighted by bad luck and madness. And is powerless to protect those she loves from a fate punctuated with dramas, all set on the banks of the Danube in Romania.
As a result of her childhood in Bucharest far from her parents, Marthe has a detached and independent personality but also a vulnerability and some peculiar quirks she never truly shakes off. Married too young to a beautiful homosexual man with private wealth, she tries to console herself with a succession of lovers, the disparate fathers of her many children. She ends up financially ruined, sick and alone, having experienced the torments of the Twentieth Century. Each of her children inherits a legend constructed from Marthe's feelings for the child's father, and from that legend they will have piece together their own life story.


Vanessa Schneider was born near Paris in 1969. She is a political journalist and works for the television agency Capa, having spent thirteen years with Lib ration. She is the author of a political essay and of a documentary film. Her first novel, La m re de ma m re was published by Stock in 2008.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: French
• ISBN: 2234061962
• ISBN13: 9782234061965
• Release Date: November 2021
• Publisher: Stock
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.5"