Published in 2017, this is by Hannelore Cayre.

I can't remember quite how I got to it. Given that its protagonist lives for most of the novel in Belleville, Paris, I'm guessing I was looking for literature set in the locales we were about to visit. But there's not exactly a paper trail.

This is the version I read:


It's actually the author who figures on this cover...

There is an English translation, entitled The Godmother, and that's the best you can do with the title, really. But there are layers in the French word that don't make it through in that translation. Daronne certainly has "boss" overtones, but essentially it is slang for mother, equivalent maybe to the way English speakers might refer to "the old lady". The "daronne" in question is Patience Portefeux -- 53, a widow, bilingual in French and Arabic, and so driven by financial desperation that she leverages her work as a legal translator/interpreter to become the kingpin in a drug-smuggling racket (a role that no doubt suggested the "godmother" translation). But godmother, with all its mafia overtones, misses the real maternal connections that drive the book. Patience's "old lady" looms very large in the story. She's incapacitated, and her daughter has to cough up EUR 3000 a month to keep her in a nursing-home that never seems to have enough staff. And this woman, Patience's mother -- never hiding her disappointment that her daughter wasn't a boy, practising the ultimate in hands-off parenting, and then spending her husband's legacy so that she ends up dependent on the person she has dissed all her life -- is very much the one who made our protagonist who she is. And then there's Patience's own role as mother. She longs to provide financial stability for the two daughters whom she says she loves to bits, but talks very little about, and this becomes a supplementary motivation in turning her from the straight and narrow.

Lots of mother stuff then... Hence my contention that The Godmother doesn't quite cut it as a title. But I can't think of anything better.


The 20th as we saw it last month

I really enjoyed this book. Part of you, of course, realizes that going rogue like this is totally unjustifiable. And really, Patience does some pretty terrible things. She's absolutely not a law-breaking paragon of virtue a la Robin Hood. And yet you like her, and you're on her side, and you really don't want her to go down.

I won't say too much more about the plot. But I'll pick up on a few of the things that I particularly appreciated:

1. Patience is a great narrator. Scathing, funny, self-deprecating, and forthright, she's also politically incorrect, but in a compassionate way. She mocks the pretentions of "hydroponic" Moroccans, detached from the soil of their erstwhile country, and frankly ignorant of it, and the young men who "exchange grand statements in which Sunni Islam (the part relating to polygamy, mainly) is mixed with the cult lines of Tony Montana, and verses from rappers with over 500 million YouTube views", but she deeply empathizes with the challenge facing those who try to do all the right things, but still find themselves constantly trodden on by society because of their ethnicity and/or religion.

2. Patience is also vitriolic about the whole elder-care situation. She refers to her mother's EHPAD (an acronym indicating accommodation for dependent elderly people) as a "mouroir", a place people go to die. She gives us a really unnerving, straight-from-the-hip description of life in one of these facilities. And the fact that Patience had a difficult relationship with her mother (who should by rights muster our sympathy, given that she escaped Nazi Vienna, but doesn't, because we see how horrible she is to everyone) complicates everything now. Very realistic... This part of the narrative draws on Cayre's own experience when her mother was approaching the end of her life: "[She was] a woman traumatized by her past, who never knew how to love her children. On her tombstone, they wrote 'she loved dogs', her daughter recounts, without animosity. 'She took two years to die, in atrocious conditions. My children were growing up, everyday life was wearing me down. Add menopause, and you get depression. So I started writing my life, part of which inspired The Godmother." Patience's depiction of the staff in the EHPAD also debunks the vicious racism that seems to be growing more prevalent in our times: "Racists of all stripes, know that the first and last person who will spoon-feed you and wash your most intimate parts is a woman you despise."



3. Nor does Patience mince her words about the police, and the business of combatting drugs. She is paid under the table by the Justice Ministry, which means no social security and no pension. I read a review that questioned the likelihood of this. And yet Cayre herself (a lawyer as well as a novelist) comments: "In court, I regularly see an 80-year-old Lebanese couple who continue to translate because they don’t have a pension." Cayre has done lots of work for "les stups" (the drug squad), so she knows the workings of the scene, and as this reviewer puts it, the novel "offers an entire ethnographic study of North African immigrants in the Parisian suburbs". And Patience puts an unyielding finger on lots of ethically debatable practices hiding on the "right" side of the law.

4. The maths speaks for itself, Patience feels: "Fourteen million cannabis users in France and 800,000 cultivators who live off what they grow in Morocco. The two countries are friendly, and yet those kids whose haggling I listened to all day long were serving heavy prison sentences for having sold their hash to the kids of the cops who were prosecuting them and the judges sentencing them, not to mention all the lawyers defending them." It really doesn't make sense, does it? She can't get rid of the thought that the drug campaign is above all an attempt to monitor populations, in that it allows the police to check the identity of Arabs and black people at least 10 times a day. By contrast, no-one worries if people are drunk all day...

5. There are plenty of other memorable characters. Patience's dad sounds larger than life, but then you read about Cayre's own father... Weapons in the house, a dodgy trucking business, a property stuck between a bit of motorway and the presidential hunting grounds of Yvelines -- what's in the book is all drawn from life... You do feel a little sorry for Philippe, the cop who's Patience's all-too-honest love interest. I don't think it's a spoiler to say it doesn't work out for them...

All up, a good read, which also had the benefit of introducing me to Tinariwen, who are awesome. Cayre is certainly worth following up.