A Couple
Éliette Abécassis’s taut and poignant novel uses reverse chronology to explore significant moments in the lives of a Parisian couple.
Jules and Alice meet in the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1955, when Alice is eighteen and Jules is twenty-two. Handsome Jules has a touch of “brilliantine” in his hair, and “expressive” Alice reads a book beneath the park’s sprawling trees. An exchange of intrigued glances leads to love, marriage, the raising of a family, discontented strife, and devoted caretaking in their later years.
At the beginning of the book, Jules is almost ninety and struggling with arthritis and a heart condition. He visits the same park where he met Alice and converses with an engaging elderly woman; they seem to share an immediate connection. They later separate. As the narrative continues, Jules and Alice move from the unsettling effects of advancing age through their respective midlife crises and the births of their children. The intimate and happy early years of the couple’s marriage are detailed along with Jules’s service in the French Algerian War; the final reversal of time returns to their first youthful meeting.
A shifting perspective offers insight into architect Jules’s wide-ranging interests and curious nature and Alice’s journalistic work and passion for feminism. While the book is compact, its impressionistic historical backdrop depicts pivotal events of twentieth-century European life well. Jules and Alice, both Jewish, lost loved ones in the Holocaust; their wedding is elegant and traditional, but they later join the tumultuous 1968 French student riots and support “activist” ideals. These more universal moments alternate with subtle and sensual interactions, heated arguments, infidelities, ironies, and repressed dissatisfaction.
With eloquent and perceptive agility, the novel A Couple captures the emotional intensities of a unique and enduring partnership.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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