Lilian Pizzichini

The Osnabrück witch trials echo down the centuries

Hélène Cixous sees the town’s attitude to ‘suspicious’ women in the 16th century reflected in her mother’s experiences there as a Jewish midwife in the 1930s

Hélène Cixous. [Getty Images]
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  • Getting Lost

    Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer

    Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp. 224, £12

  • Well-Kept Ruins

    élène Cixous, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic

    Seagull Books, pp. 156, £15

Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by the prize-winning novelist Annie Ernaux while she was having an affair with a married man in 1989. Ernaux has already written a novel about this relationship. Now we have a more immediate and intimate account.

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