Pascale Kramer

Gloria

« À quoi se mesurait finalement la normalité des vies? »

When Michel receives a phone call from Gloria, asking him to go and see her, he knows he should say ‘no’: he shouldn’t go. Gloria belongs to his past, he was involved with her years before. He knew her at that time in his life, when he was still married and was working in an advice centre that she occasionally visited, when she was hanging out on the streets. In the meantime, Michel has been sacked by the advice centre: they said at first it was because he was being too sympathetic to clients; then he was accused of having inappropriate relationships with children.
In spite of this, Michel goes to see Gloria, who is now living with her three year-old daughter. Gloria is still the childish woman he knew back then: pigheaded and intellectually lazy. But she has matured in the intervening years. So will she thank him for the support he gave her all that time ago?
Her attitude towards her daughter, Naïs, very soon begins to worry Michel. He had advised her to keep her child, though her own adoptive parents would have preferred an abortion. And so, within a few months, they become involved again in the same way as before, in the same complicated relationship they had in former times: who is helping whom? Which of them is really reliant on the other? Who has the dominant role?
As always in Pascale Kramer’s books, children are central to the story. They shed light on so many issues: the cracks and rifts of life. In Gloria, Pascale Kramer deals with the ambivalent feelings that mark out human relationships.
(Martin Zingg, translated by Max Easterman, Rosie Goldsmith)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Flammarion, Paris 2013

ISBN: 978-2-08-129510-0