Skip to main content

A Letter from Luxembourg

The French translation of All the Lives We Never Lived had a bumpy start. Its release in March 2020 crashed full tilt into worldwide lockdowns. Bookshops were shut, literary festivals cancelled, reading seemed to be the last thing on people's distracted, panic-stricken minds. I thought the book would sink to the bottom of the sea floor and rest quietly there along with other wrecks.
But readers are tenacious people. The other day there was an email from one of them, Valérie Voisin, which I am reproducing below unaltered because it so vividly and movingly describes her experience of how she got and read a book by an author unknown to her, during a lockdown. 
I am grateful to Valérie for taking the trouble to write to me and for giving me permission to reproduce her message.



Dear Madam,

I discovered your novel during the lockdown when the bookshop started a on-line shop section and delivered books at home. It was a new process for the book seller and he only provided list of books without more details.

I selected your novel because of the title which was so intriguing. I looked on the net what it is about and have been convince by the topic, mix of family relationship, art, history and the exoticism of all countries mentioned... all what i generally like.

I am French and i leave in Luxembourg, I am not used to write author. So please excuse my clumsiness.

I just finished to read your book 30 min ago, it accompanied me during this strange period and I am so grateful to choose it.

Being sensitive to art, travel, discovering people, your novel allow me to have all of them when i was just sitting on the sofa with a limited area to move around. I liked the description of human relationship, so complex but not so different from one continent to another. All rules and restrictions imposed on women, the "what will people say". Everywhere it is the same...

It was fantastic to travel through your words in your country or in Bali. To feel and imagine the nature around.

Thanks to you, I am discovering this artist what I never heard about before, discovering his production, his sensitivity. I will have nice moments now to read about him and try to discovering his paintings. The art is the 20's/30's was extraordinary and I am delighted to discover something new about this period.

I am so enthusiast about your book that since 2 weeks, I am recommanding it to my relatives. I don't know what they will do about it, read or not read, but for me it was a fantastic moment.

Your work must have been massive and the help from so many people is impressive but the result is a beautiful jewellery.

Many thanks and I will be happy to ready your other books.

Have a lovely day.

Valerie Voisin

TRANSLATED BY MYRIAM BELLEHIGUE
"Un beau roman : drames intimes, soubresauts historiques du XX° et
univers fascinant de Bali" -- Marie de Benoist, Culture Tops

"Un livre dépaysant et émouvant que je vous recommande vivement si vous voulez vous évader" -- Journal de François

"Une roman tout de poésie et de nostalgie" Madame Figaro

"Anuradha Roy maîtrise l’art des récits amples, peuplés de personnages riches, mûris en elle" -- Marianne Meunier, La Croix L'Hebdo

"Ici la grande histoire côtoie l'intime. Un livre poignante sur l'enfance déchirée, l'amour malmené et la trajectoire heurtée d'une femme libre" DNA

"Un merveilleux roman, à la fois historique et poétique, sur la trajectoire heurtée d’une femme libre et sur la douloureuse posture d’attente adoptée par son fils" Madame Maroc,  10 livres à lire absolument (et à se faire livrer)


Paperback / ACTES SUD

Popular posts from this blog

Painting a Residency

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...
Read more

Begum Anees Khan

  Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea.  Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...
Read more

THROWING IT OUT AND STARTING AGAIN

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter.  (Read it here in Catapult) After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to lo...
Read more