Crazy Genie by Ines Cagnati

I told her about her, of what the grandfather had told me, that before she had me she would laugh and sing day and night, and that later, once she was expecting me, she never wanted to say who my father was, and the grandmother, who is a bad woman, had gone into a fury because she didn't wand bad things like that to happen in her family, which was the most respectable in the village. Then she had moved into the shack under the crazy willows that talk at night, and she had never gone back to her home, and she worked at people's houses to be fed, and they called her Crazy Genie because she never talked, but she wasn't crazy, she simply didn't talk and didn't laugh.

Marie's mother is known in her village as "Crazy Genie." Despite coming from a respected family, she takes on odd jobs to survive: milking cows, threshing wheat, husking corn. She's not really crazy--the word is a tool that the people of the village use to place her beyond their sympathy and understanding. If Genie has fallen in the world, it must be her own fault--as Marie's grandmother, still incensed about Genie's becoming pregnant out of wedlock, believes--or, more likely, there's just something wrong with her that can't be helped. Marie spends much of her childhood trying to make sense of this dynamic, while trying without success to become closer to her mother, whose material sacrifices we can see clearly are meant to protect and care for Marie, but who is extremely sparing with words or gestures of maternal love. The only things that Genie says to Marie for much of the book are commands: "Go home," "Don't bother me," etc., etc.

It's a dangerous world out there for girls, as Marie finds when the town mason, Ernest, is lying in wait for her en route from a job back to her home under the "crazy willows that talk at night." We learn later--spoiler alert--that this Ernest is Marie's father, and that he has raped his own daughter just as he raped Genie many years before. In this way, Crazy Genie becomes a book about the way that male cruelty can have resounding effects well past the moment of violence: Ernest's deeds ripple throughout Genie's life as well as Marie's, and his rape of her, which is presented rather elliptically in the text, is perhaps only a more severe manifestation of the general ruin he has brought upon her. And yet, Ernest is a distant figure from the narrative, appearing only a few times in the shadows. Men, of course, get to walk away. But there are others who collaborate in this violence and ruining: the grandmother, of course, and the townspeople, whose incurious nature prevents them from seeing the injustice that lies behind Genie's tough exterior.

It's easy to see what Crazy Genie has in common with Free Day, the Ines Cagnati book that NYRB translated and published a few years ago. Both are about young girls living in difficult circumstances in the French countryside, trying to scrabble out an existence in the face of disadvantageous circumstances. But they're incredibly different stylistically. Marie's language is much simpler, more systematic, as might fit a more rational and less emotional child who is trying to make sense of the world around her. The simplicity of the language emphasizes, too, the repetitiveness and routine of the life that Marie lives with Genie. It's a style that works, but it's not as good as Free Day, a book where anxiety and dread leak through the language in a much more interesting way. That said, Crazy Genie moves toward a climactic ending that is as difficult and tragic as anything in Free Day, and which elevated the book for me--because I always appreciate a real bummer.

Free Day by Ines Cagnati

Me, I've never been able to love anything, because nobody wanted me. I know that my mother didn't have time to look after me, what with the field work, the livestock, my father, Maria and the other babies that never stopped coming, and after that, Aunt Gina's romance novels. I don't miss the caresses I never had. They horrify me. Even right now, if someone brought a damp mouth to me for a kiss I would slap them hard, I'd be so horrified. Except for my mother. She's my mother. And Fanny. She has smooth, freckled cheeks, like warm bread. She's so pretty. If I'd been loved, I'd be pretty, too. It would have been enough for me to be a puppy or any kind of domestic animal. My father and mother take good care of animals. As for me, when I was little, I would have liked to be a little calf. I would have been loved, like everybody.

Galla, the protagonist of Ines Cagnati's Free Day, takes an extra holiday off from boarding school to travel home on her loyal bicycle. But when she arrives, her father takes one look at her and tells her to go away. So begins the titular "free day": one in which Galla wanders around the outskirts of her home, waiting for her mother to come out, cuddling with her dog, Daisy, and exploring the familiar--but loathed--marshes around her house.

Galla's free day is an opportunity to reflect on her place in the world: the favorite of her always-pregnant mother, she is the oldest of her many sisters. Their land is poor, and they live in deep poverty, yet Galla has managed to convince her mother to send her to the high school in the city. She is despised by the other students, who look down on her for wearing the wrong color smock--she can't afford any other--and by her teachers, who consider her rude and a troublemaker. (Only Fanny, of the warm bread cheeks, is a beacon among them.) And though Galla seems to despise the inanity of school, and her mother deeply needs her at home to help look after the smallest children, including tiny blind Antonella, Galla insists on doing to school because she senses, it seems, that school is the way to get out of the foggy and noxious marshes, and the cycle of poverty in which her family is trapped.

Galla is ambitious, then, but she is also cynical and full of self-loathing. She spends much of her free day thinking about how she'd prefer to die: lost at sea, so that she might sink to the bottom and never be found. Violent fantasies are informed by a life punctuated with violence: at successive steps along the marsh, Galla is reminded of her how her father hangs their dogs, or the car crash she caused which caused a little girl to lose half her face, or the death of her beloved younger sister Cendrine, who was hooked by a cow and launched into a field (!). Does such violence ever touch the other girls at the high school? Or is it only the property of the poor? In her foreword, translator Liesl Schillinger describes how Free Day is inspired by Cagnati's experiences as the child of Italian immigrants brought into France for poor labor. It's a book about the experience--troubling, even dangerous--of being an outsider.

Galla's voice is what really makes Free Day so engaging from the very beginning. Simple, like a young girl's voice, but full of weary wisdom, and a strange mix of self-hatred and bold defiance. It works so well, is so endearing and so chilling, that it propels the book foreword even though, properly speaking, hardly anything happens: just a girl wandering around the marshes, thinking about her life.