INDULGENCES

PASCALE KRAMER

(FLAMMARION, 256 pages, 2024)

In the late 1970s, after the death of their father, three brothers gather with their wives and children in the family villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. There, thirteen-year-old Clémence begins to develop a fascination for her lighthearted uncle, Vincent: favorite son, brilliant art dealer, compulsive seducer. At fifteen, her crush turns into an obsession; at eighteen, she becomes his occasional mistress. Their two-year affair would have remained a secret but for Anne-Lise, Vincent’s wife, who years later, intent on getting a divorce, reveals the incestuous liaison to the rest of the family.

Following the thread of this event with its long repercussions in five stages from 1977 to 2016, Pascale Kramer examines the romantic sensitivities of three generations of wives, mothers, and daughters. With her keen talent for depicting the gray zones of the human psyche, she explores the spirit of each era through the prism of the women and their active part in the evolution of their relationships with men, with their excesses as well as their indulgences. Subtly yet with implacable efficacy, she unveils the mechanisms and the tacit rules that ensure Vincent his impunity; a patriarchal code accepted, respected, and followed, so that it becomes invisible. Using fine touches rather than bold assertions, Kramer resists the temptation to deprive any of her characters of their full complexities: their expectations and disappointments, their foibles and vanities, their enthusiasms and blind spots. As a reviewer notes: “the ruthless delicacy of Kramer spares no one.”

In Indulgences, Kramer has crafted a tightly woven, finely written novel rich in psychological insights that goes to the heart of seduction and domination between men and women.

Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, is the acclaimed author of fifteen books, including three novels published in English: Autopsy of a Father (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017), The Child (Bellevue Literary Press, 2013), and The Living (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles and now lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about children’s rights.