Pascal Lainé

This was the 1974 Goncourt winner and was made into a successful film that launched the career of Isabelle Huppert.

Pomme is a young woman of few aspirations and a humble background, the daughter of a waitress and part-time prostitute from a small town in Northern France. She's working as a hairdresser's assistant, but with her passive demeanour and reluctance to engage in modern life, she strikes the narrator as someone who would fit better into a 17th century painting than into the Paris of the 1970s.

On holiday in Cabourg in Normandy with her colleague Marylène, who has drawn her into a quasi-erotic relationship during a brief dearth of men and ditches her again as soon as the supply is restored, Pomme meets Aimery de Béligné, a young man who's also not entirely at home in the 20th century. He is the son of an impoverished but aristocratic Normandy family, studying to become a museum curator. They share an ice-cream, have a series of amusingly mismanaged not-quite-dates, are drawn together by their shared awkwardness, and of course wind up living together for a while in Aimery's student garret when they return to Paris. And just as inevitably, Aimery behaves badly, Pomme accepts it as part of the natural scheme of things, and it never occurs to Aimery how badly he has hurt her until it's far too late to fix things.

The perfect plot for a wistfully-tragic French film, but it felt a bit too facile for a novel: Lainé doesn't really seem to debate or challenge the idea of men as thoughtless agents of harm and women as passive victims, he simply portrays it as a sad but inevitable (and somehow quaintly charming) aspect of how life is, for some people at least.… (more)