From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of words.
Illiterate, isolated, and held at arm’s length by a bitter father, François Sorrente has spent his seventeen years within narrow confines. By day he tends the family farm’s pigs; by night he manages the household chores. Still, François can’t help but wonder about the wider world and his place in it. Who was his mother, who he remembers not at all? And why is the opposite shore of the river, where his beloved older sister disappeared many years ago, forbidden to him?
Propelled by curiosity, François turns to the eclectic denizens of his town to help make sense of these mysteries. He begins reading lessons with a melancholy curé, falls into an affair with a village woman, and affectionately confides his secrets to a velvet-eared piglet named Hyménée. As François questions both his origins and the course of his life, he begins to unlock the true story of his mother and sister, and comes to reinvent himself.
Exquisitely translated from the French by poet Jody Gladding,
If You Cross the River is a magical debut.
About the author
Jody Gladding’s translations include Jean Giono’s Serpent of Stars and Pierre Michon’s Small Lives, which won the Florence Gould and French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Her collections of poems include Stone Crop, which was chosen by James Dickey for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1993, as well as Rooms and their Airs and Translations from Bark Beetle. Gladding has also been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place, and has received a Whiting Writers’ Award. Her work also includes collaborative site-specific installations that explore the interface of language and ecology. She directs the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.
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