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Confronting absent memories
Print Edition
BOOKS with a clear beginning, middle and end, dialogues and character development are plentiful. Marie Nimier’s “The Queen of Silence” isn’t one of them.
Beginning with an account of numbers that describes a fatal car accident on a Friday night in 1962, the French writer’s consciousness novel delves into the life of the hero of the story, Nimier’s father, Roger Nimier, who died on the scene. He was only 36, but had already gained fame in the French literary world for his work “The Blue Hussar,” published in 1950.
The crash also took the life of a young woman who was sitting on the passenger seat of his red Aston Martin. She was 27, and had just signed her first book contract with Editions Gallimard, for which Roger Nimier was the chief reviewer. They were also in a relationship.
“What to say when there is nothing more to say? I mean about their relationship. I was not in the car. I was only 5 years old. I hadn’t seen my father for months…” Nimier read at the Shanghai launch of the book’s Chinese edition, translated by Yuan Xiaoyi, professor of French at East China Normal University.
Composed of scraps of her own memories at a tender age, as well as the newspaper accounts, photos, personal letters and stories from those who knew Roger Nimier, Marie Nimier describes a father who was abusive as a husband and selfish as a parent, yet irritable and vulnerable when his early success became a burden rather than a joy.
After her father’s death, Nimier and her brother were sent to live at their grandfather’s house as their mother worried that they were too young to understand the gossip and headlines around the accident.
“I didn’t realize he was dead, even on the day he was buried. We didn’t attend his funeral. And no one took us to his grave,” Nimier told Shanghai Daily. “My mother kept saying that we were great gifts of his love. She told us that our father had an accident and he left... So it was never confirmed that his death was real.”
In the book, Nimier keeps questioning whether her father loved her. Her father’s “untouchable absence” defines her childhood, and, later, leaves her with “a sense of emptiness.”
As a grown-up, Nimier attended a public auction of her father’s works and came across a letter he had written to a friend at the time of his daughter’s birth. “Yes, Nadine (Nimier’s mother) had a daughter yesterday. I wish she could immediately drown in the Seine, so that I won’t hear people talking about it anymore,” he wrote.
“I can understand that it was a humorous way of being a new father… but it still was a very odd way to deal with it, wasn’t it?” Nimier, 58, said. “My father was part of a generation of people who lived through depression, fought World War II and adored speed cars, sex, brotherhood and masculinity. We — I mean my generation — is no longer like that.”
“I don’t think we would ever get along with each other quite well, even if he was still alive,” she said.
The sudden loss of her father in her early childhood left Nimier with barely any memories of him. She said she didn’t even have a photo that shows the two of them. But the impact lasted a lifetime. An angry and rebellious teenager, she once tried to commit suicide, tore up her father’s will and didn’t allow herself to even think about him.
Yuan, who translated the book, said that it was a moving story of a woman who finally tries to remember her father.
“After keeping silent for almost 40 years, Nimier finally decided to open up and reconcile with her father. After all, she is Roger Nimier’s only daughter, and ‘only’ means she had no other choice,” Yuan wrote in a postscript to the book.
Have you passed the driving test?
No, though I tried four times, and each time it was worse than the last. I wrote about them in the book to pull myself out from the heavy memories of my father and give myself some time to breathe. My father died in a car crash. Like a family curse, neither my brother nor I dare to drive. I live in the countryside and have raised two children. All my life takes place within walking distance.
Why “The Queen of Silence”?
The title came from a postcard that my father left me that had one single sentence written on it: What will the Queen of Silence say? I was intrigued when I read the postcard because it is self-contradicting. If I really say something, I won’t be the queen of silence, but if I say nothing, then I can’t answer this question. So, I choose to write, a process of talking, yet in a silent way.
Is the book about your father or more of yourself?
I didn’t deliberately gather the information to write a biography of my father or an autobiography of myself. No one cares about who I am or who my father was. What I really want to do is to reconstruct the memories of a father who is absent in the years of our growing up, but has never really left.
How do you feel after finishing the book?
I think I can better understand my father’s pain. I have never really hated him for not “being present.” In my mind, he often drove too fast and got drunk. I feel sad for him. He could not express his pain because he was a proud man — the plight of the past generation.
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