The liberation and redemption of a strange girl and a sad old man

From birth, Isor has been a different child. She doesn't speak, she doesn't hear, she shows almost no interest in anything around her. Is she autistic? Not exactly, the doctors say. Her parents love her, but they don't understand anything and are exhausted. Fed up with vague diagnoses and useless treatments, unable to manage her socially, they haven't enrolled their daughter in school. Now thirteen, she seems to only like foreign television channels and animal documentaries. Furthermore, Isor occasionally has terrible fits of rage, which cause chaos and leave her parents—Maude, a firefighter, and Camillio, a window cleaner for tall buildings—devastated. With such a unique protagonist, Alice Renard (Paris, 2002) could have crafted a story of extravagant, poetic, and non-normative sentimentality, but one rife with mawkishness. Anger and desire That's not it. It's a strangely emotional little novel about a girl who isn't normal.

Renard's novel has three parts, each with its own narrators and shifting points of view. In the first, Isor's parents explain, through brief paragraphs in which they alternate narration, how they see their daughter, what feelings she evokes in them, and how they relate to her: from unconditional love to the exhaustion of having to bear the frustration of not understanding the girl, the temptation to reject her and abandon her. Everything is conditioned by Isor in the lives of Maude and Camillio, who can no longer bear it but, at the same time, want to protect her and can't help but worry about her, for example, when she runs away from home to explore her neighborhood in Paris.

The second part is narrated by a neighbor, Lucien, an elderly and cultured man, wounded by a dramatic event from his past, who finds solace only in solitude and music. That is, until Isor appears in his life, and a prodigious friendship is born—a journey of non-sensual love. Thus, everything that in the parents' story was tension, powerlessness, misunderstandings, and dissonance, in Lucien's story is comprehension, affection, understanding, and mutual connection. This second part is just as brisk as the first, although a touch more conventional, and convincingly recounts the unlikely connection between a melancholy old man and an unusual young woman who quickly realize they can save each other. Renard's prose, with lyrical touches that neither cloy nor disrupt the rhythm, is vivid and profoundly insightful.

More plausible and believable from a poetic than a clinical point of view, the third part doesn't recount Isor's escape through her neighborhood but rather a journey to Sicily. Perhaps because in this final section Isor speaks for the first time—sending her parents letters of unusual loquacity, and she herself is torrential, expansive, and elevated—or perhaps because here the novel ceases to be a harsh but laudatory exploration of difference and becomes a tale of liberation and redemption. This doesn't diminish the talent of Alice Renard, a very young author who, in her debut novel, written in 2023, displays an archetypally Parisian literary precocity.