hunting and gathering

since moving to paris and discovering the joys of reading in french, i’ve become somewhat a fan of anna gavalda. i'd even go so far as nominating her to literary-crush status. the thing that really gets me about her writing is her ability to beautifully capture everyday predicaments and weave them into a captivating storyline without making them gaudy or clichéd.

hunting and gathering the first of her books to cross my path was hunting and gathering which was loaned to me by a friend (who clearly knew my reading tastes well and as a result is still my friend).

as you’ll gather by the title I actually read this one in english (in french it's ensemble, c'est tout which has rien à voir with hunting or gathering, but there you go) because at that stage my french was barely at ordering baguette level and just the thought of reading whole french sentences one after another was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat. nonetheless - and i risk making it sound like a dan brown here which is not at all my intention - i could not make myself put hunting and gathering down and spent two weeks walking through the paris metro and along the champs elysées on my way to work and french classes with my nose firmly stuck between the pages.

it’s the story of four very different people - a self-isolatingly independent young woman, a socially inept intello, a boorish workaholic chef and his progressively senile granny - who, by various circumstances, find themselves living under the same roof. what I found wonderful about the communion of these four characters was that, as different as they all may seem at the outset, you eventually come to discover how similar they all are. they all have one very important trait in common: they’d like to make out that they can manage just fine on their own, thank you very much, but really what they need is the support and love of other people. gradually each of them lets down the barricades with which they have fortified themselves and the four of them come to form an unexpected kind of family.

by kimberley davis

... to read more about anna gavalda visit kimberley's blog everday bookery