It’s hard to imagine a novel getting out of the starting gate faster than Valérie Perrin’s Tata. The book—first published in France in 2024, and now available in Hildegarde Serle’s English translation—opens with the gendarmerie captain of the Ville of Gueugnon calling Agnès Dugain in Paris with some bad news. Her aunt, Colette Septembre, is dead.
Agnès protests.
Not out of grief, but bewilderment… because her aunt died three years ago. At the time Agnès, a renowned filmmaker, was living in Los Angeles with her actor-husband and their daughter. Colette’s dear friend and long-time landlord Louis had phoned back then, and Agnès had acceded to his insistence that she need not return to France for the funeral. At the time, Agnès hadn’t been particularly grief-stricken. She’d spent her childhood summers with Colette, while her musician parents were touring, but always found her aunt old-maidish and dull, despite her quirk of being a huge football fan, knowledgeable about all the players of the local club. For the stretch of time Agnès was in Los Angeles, she and Colette had a weekly phone call where nothing much was said.
All the same, Agnès goes to Gueugnon to identify the body. And, sure enough, the dead woman is Colette.
How to understand this? Where has Colette been, and why has she been out of touch for three years? Why did Louis lie, and who is in the coffin below Colette’s gravestone marker? After all, it’s not just Agnès who thought Colette was dead—the whole town thought she was gone.
Agnès is in a good place to explore this mystery, though in every other way she is not in a good place, because just before she first learned of Colette’s death, her husband left her for a younger woman. Agnès still hasn’t rebounded. She and her now-15-year-old daughter are back in Paris, where people recognize Agnès on the street, and ask after her next film project. But she has lost the will to create. She’s a clearly passionate person who can’t really imagine doing much of anything anymore.
Only suddenly she does have a desire. She wants to go back to Gueugnon to find out what happened.
Tata is a long novel that reads fast. Agnès is fervent, and Perrin is a master of surprise who allows fascinating stories within stories to emerge. We even learn the details of the imaginative narratives Agnès has dreamed up for her films, a pleasure in part because Perrin is not only the author of three previous novels but the writer or co-writer of multiple films, including several with her husband, the French film director Claude Lelouch.
The present day narrative of Tata takes place over the course of a year and incorporates historical material concerning Colette and Agnès late father, siblings who grew up on an impoverished farm on the town’s outskirts. Music allowed Agnès’s father—a brilliant pianist from an early age—to escape his uneducated and unloving parents. Craftsmanship allowed Colette to do the same, and she operated Gueugnon’s shoe-mender’s shop for decades. We also learn more about Colette’s now grown childhood friends, assorted townspeople, and a circus family who once passed through Gueugnon.
Brutal men determine the fate of many of these characters. They are disappeared by Hitler, sexually abused by the town’s football club coach, or savagely beaten (and even murdered) by the father of the circus family. The long reach of such trauma is arguably the book’s subject, since we watch as characters adapt to these blows, sometimes choosing to disappear within life. Still, the book ultimately addresses how people transcend what they’ve suffered.
Late in the book, a scene depicts Agnès’s parents having their first kiss, under the astronomical clock in Prague. Perrin writes, “And they were so busy kissing at one second past eleven that they didn’t see the Walk of the Apostles, those figures pursued around the dial by the skeleton of Death.” The sentence might be a metaphor for the entire book, characters chased by inescapable threats, and yet still figuring out how to love.
Debra Spark’s most recent novel is Discipline. She teaches at Colby College in Maine.
