“Thought provoking, well designed, short.” ‘Well, that last one is a good thing,’ says a friend who takes about five years to finish one novel. And on this occasion I agree. Peirene Press seek out acclaimed European short literature (never more than 200 pages) and revel in translating it. Peirene’s canon is also short, only three novellas, but already it is diverse. I have picked their first release, Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea and their newest, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius (published in September), and have set aside a day in which to hunker down and read them both.
Véronique Olmi is an acclaimed French playwright; Bord de Mer is her first foray into novel writing and her talents as a dramatist underpin the novella. The protagonist is an unnamed mother – she is our narrator, our eyes. We are thrown into her grim, rain-soaked, dark little world and we must follow her, with her two young boys, to the seaside.
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