Why Join?

  • Add New Books

  • Write a Review

  • Backpack Reading Lists

  • Newsletter Updates

Join Now

Talking Location With author Alicia Drake – Le Jardin du Luxembourg

8th February 2018

I Love you Too Much by Alicia Drake, novel set in the 6ème Arrondissement of Paris.

Alicia Drake

“In the sixth arrondissement everything is perfect and everyone is lonely”

The author with her novel à Paris

Review:

It is not often that a book of this binding quality arrives on our desk, beautiful ochre linen cloth and black/white photos of the Jardin du Luxembourg adorning the inner covers. You just know you are in for a treat! And a treat it is! A fairly short book, it charts one Autumn and Winter period of 13 year old Paul, who is living with his Mother Sévérine, and her newly born daughter (his step sister) Lou; plus her younger hanger-on musician lover, Gabriel. Paul’s biological father meanwhile has set up home a little way across the city.

Paul is a young, adolescent boy, who has to adapt to the needs of his toxic parents who are focussed on themselves and their needs, largely at his expense. It is a lonely existence for him as he tries to understand the ways of adults, culminating in the shock of one event that shatters his teetering coming-of-age world. His confidante is fellow pupil Scarlett (whom he meets when the social elite of the 6th arrondissement decamps for Thalasso treatments to Brittany for a few days). She becomes his companion as he navigates this exceptionally trying period of his life. She is attached to an internet world that comforts her in her loneliness.

Paris is beautifully observed as he wanders through the Jardin du Luxembourg from his home on the Rue d’Assas, taking in the swirling waters of the Seine, observing the people going about their daily lives, perhaps shopping at Le Bon Marché just a stone’s throw from his father’s apartment .

Detail in this book is on so many levels rich and satisfying. Paul tackles his angst by eating – Pringles, Chupa Chups and chips, much to his svelte mother’s chagrin (she is very Parisian in her attention to her own looks and honed body image).

The social issues of Filipina maids is also a feature of the book. Cindy, who works for Paul’s household, is an illegal immigrant. She is in an invidious position as she cannot leave France, because she could never return. She is thus denied seeing her own young children, a sad irony as childcare for others is her life. Other Parisians of social parity, also employ – if indeed that is the right word – immigrants to nanny and clean for them. It is thought-provoking content all round.

So, you can guess I liked this book very much. It delivers on all levels and I highly recommend this absorbing and well written novel.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

Over to Alicia for the TripFiction #TalkingLocationWtih… feature

I lived in Paris for 18 years. I used to live just south of the jardin du Luxembourg, on a little road that gives on to the Avenue de L’Observatoire. It is a kind of restrained, residential, but not exactly bourgeois place to live in Paris. There is something secretive about it; perhaps that is why Mitterrand chose to stage his fake assassination attempt here in 1959.

I wasn’t around to see that.

I lived here during the Sarkozy era. I have five children and they went to school and to the halte-garderie on the other side of the park, which meant I walked back and forth across the jardin everyday, sometimes up to six times a day. I watched the different seasons. I saw children coming out of schools, hanging out in the jardin. I watched children at the dalle (a big slab of tarmac in the middle of the jardin), at the sandpit, being dropped off and picked up at ballet lessons, at the football club, coming home from the swimming pool.

The 6ème arrondissement is an idyllic and privileged setting for childhood and yet there seemed to be so much loneliness.

I started writing about loneliness, my loneliness, their loneliness.

I started writing about Paul, about his loneliness and longing, about growing up with narcissistic parents in an apartment in Paris. I started writing I love you too much.

The Jardin du Luxembourg (photo left) is an important place for Paul. He lives in an apartment and the jardin is a place where he can feel the ground beneath his feet. It is a place of refuge, a place of escape. It is a magical jardin, beautiful, melancholic, a place for him to experience nature, even if that nature is constrained by guards in uniform who stop people from walking on the grass, by gardeners strapping fruit trees to outstretched metal frames or sweeping fallen leaves into great big metal cages.

The Théâtre du Luxembourg (photo right) is a puppet theatre in the jardin. It was built in 1933 as the first puppet theatre in France by director Robert Desarthis. His son, Francis-Claude Desarthis, runs and animates the puppets today. He took over from his father in 1971. It is a Parisian institution and grandparents and parents take children on Wednesday afternoons. The bell is rung five minutes before the show begins and children rush to grab a wooden seat near to the front. I love the building and the typeface of its name on the wall. Inside it is a strange mixture of controlled entertainment ¾ children sitting with adults on narrow wooden benches ¾ and the surreal ¾ garish puppet faces and the veiled menace of childhood tales.

The dalle (photo left) is where kids go after school to play football and big guys move in on the weekends and on summer days to play basketball. It is an iconic playground in the lives of children who live round here. There is also a carrousel, which is the oldest in Paris and was built in 1879. Children on the outside horses are given metal rods and they have to try and fit the rod through a metal ring that hangs from a wooden dummy. They have to try and get as many rings on their rods as possible during the time of the ride. My children loved this game. It created some hot competition.

In my imagination these metal chairs are where Paul sits with his friends during his lunch break. They cross the jardin first to go to ‘McDo’s’ on the Boulevard Saint Michel and then they come back and sit and eat here. I spent a long time observing and writing right here. I always use the same notebooks to write in: Moleskine, Kraft paper, Size L. I filled 22 notebooks for this novel and many have observations of the jardin and the young people there. When I started I love you too much it was really at the outset of social media. There was Facebook, but no Snapchat or Instagram. Already lives were being lived on phones. I watched the changing ways of socialising. I wrote about kids on phones, about the dust on the allée, the sound of tennis balls and shouts, the moss on the statues, the smell of crêpes in the cold November air. I love the jardin du Luxembourg.

This sculpture (photo on the right) is more significant to my life than to my novel. I used to pass it everyday with my children. We loved the lion, even though he had just killed an ostrich. We forgave him because of his majesty. It is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Nicolas Cain, 1870. It is called Le Lion de Nubie et sa proie. I remember all those days we walked past the lion stamping on his prey. Running because we were late. Crying because socks were bumpy. Laughing because of the snow. Childhood is the sum of all these everydays.

You can follow Alicia on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and via her website

Do come and join team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comments

  1. User: andrewmorris51

    Posted on: 08/02/2018 at 9:37 pm

    What a sensitive and thought-provoking piece from Alicia. And I’d love to read all of your 22 Moleskine notebooks to see the Jardin du Luxembourg through your eyes, and with all that daily detail, Alicia.

    Thanks for letting us see behind the covers of I Love you Too Much.

    Andrew for TF

    Comment

  2. User: Jessica Norrie

    Posted on: 08/02/2018 at 9:59 am

    Ah! I was a foreign language assistant at the teacher training centre in the rue du Four in 1980. The 6th was brilliant place to be “a student with a salary”, but I can’t imagine it for children. Your post is very evocative.

    Comment