Marie-Antoinette Alpert

Vivi's War Marie-Antoinette Alpert

Revisiting her early life, Marie-Antoinette Alpert tells the wrenching story of a family of refugees in Brittany during World War II, as seen through the eyes of a small girl. Vivi's frantic struggle to understand her mother's sudden disappearance is brought to life by Alpert's raw, unfiltered prose. Only five years old at the beginning of this remarkable tale, the young protagonist has little to go on beyond euphemistic religious aphorisms. As Vivi describes the troubled routine of her daily existence with her three sisters and her pious grandmother, who is hiding an astonishing secret, the cruel reality of war in a small town that is the dysfunctional microcosm of France under Nazi rule is depicted with remarkable emotional force. Vivi regularly accompanies her itinerant father, an agricultural comptroller for the French administration, on his runs to the local farms. Her earnest eye misses nothing, from his bungling efforts to find a new spouse to his attempts to undermine Vichy. When she isn't exploring the countryside on her father's rusty bicycle or helping him produce his roaming puppet show, Vivi turns her attention to the inhabitants of Forêt-Fouesnant, from the coterie of local collaborators living it up under the Occupation to an androgynous outcast, Lillimoumoute, and a mysterious woman who rambles through the woods at night. As Vivi must face to a series of bewildering events, the gnawing pain of her mother's perplexing disappearance only escalates, leaving not just a void, but also a mystery she is desperate to solve. Vivi's fascinating tale provides an unprecedented glimpse into the life of a young child in rural France during the last world war, and will grace readers with a luminous and boldly original literary voice.