A L Attention de la Femme de Menage

A NOTE FOR THE CLEANER
A beautiful country house, set in wooded gardens, all staircases and successions of elegantly furnished rooms. A house populated with memories, ghosts and daydreams. A house where two women live.
One was widowed a few months ago. She often likes to sit in the winter drawing room to read, silent and pensive. The other is Marie-Jeanne, a lively, disorganised and infinitely sensual young girl. She has no ties, she turned up one day to be taken care of... and never left.
The two women fell for each other straight away but, with the passing seasons, the widow has more and more trouble tolerating Marie-Jeanne, her long mysterious baths and her unconditional love; and she becomes increasingly cruel. Her dreams are infiltrated by the ghost of her hard harsh mother and her father who used to tell her the bewitching myth of the sirens. She gradually develops a longing to destroy this doomed love or to turn it into something else.
As a backdrop to the story of these two women, and almost inextricable from the house itself, the cleaner goes about her business like a shadow. She is the depository for their secrets, witness to their troubled affections and their peculiar metamorphosis.
Like a fairy tale, a legend or a baroque reverie, A Note for the Cleaner is an unusual first novel with bewitching images and language.
Born in Toulouse in 1983, Emilie Desvaux studies French literature. A Note for the Cleaner is her first novel.