Miscellaneous
Sándor Márai’s Embers, translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), is the best literary exploration of a couple’s long silence I have come across. Many thanks to Bertrand Deschamps for giving it to me. “Donal Og,” my grandfather’s mysterious poem, was written long ago by an anonymous poet and translated from the Irish by Lady Augusta Gregory. It appears, in a version slightly different from the one my grandfather had, in The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1999; available in translation through the University of California Press), Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) are the three books on remembering the Shoah that have stayed with me the longest and affected me the most strongly. Irène Némirovsky’s Suite fran?aise (Paris: éditions Deno?l, 2004; available in translation from Vintage Books) is an excellent snapshot of the chaos of the dr?le de guerre. Leslie Maitland’s Crossing the Borders of Time (New York: Other Press, 2012) is a moving and meticulously researched family saga about two lovers separated during World War II, and I am deeply grateful to Ms. Maitland for her close reading and invaluable comments on my own work. Iron Curtain, by Anne Applebaum (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), provided precious last-minute insights into the aftermath of the war. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) helped me to think about fairy tales and how we read them. Michel de Certeau’s L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975; available in translation through Columbia University Press) probably made this book harder to write than it otherwise would have been, but I am grateful for all the ways in which de Certeau’s work deepened and complicated my thinking about history and memory. And Romain Gary’s Les cerfs-volants (Paris: Gallimard, 1980) remains the best piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction, I have ever read about the Second World War in France, or about any subject, for that matter. I am currently translating it into English, but until I am done, it is worth learning French for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIRANDA RICHMOND MOUILLOT was born in Asheville, North Carolina. She lives in the South of France with her husband, daughter, and cat.