This prize-winning French novel translated by Sam Taylor is inspired by the life of German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who was gassed in Auschwitz in 1943, with her unborn child. Her short tragic story was marked by Nazi persecution, a family riddled with suicides – including her mother’s when Charlotte was eight – and also by extraordinary talent. Foenkinos writes arrestingly about Charlotte, masterfully imagining her interior life as well as charting his responses as he follows her to places “charged with terror”.
Overwhelmed by the material, he “felt the need to move to the next line in order to breathe”, so each sentence is given its own separate line.
So much space on the page visually transforms each paragraph into a stanza, while lending the words a solemn weight and power. The note of hope in this beautiful, wretched story is in the survival of Charlotte’s great work, Life? or Theatre? A Song-play, a lightly fictionalised memoir made up of hundreds of paintings, drawings, texts and musical annotations, created during the two years she spent in hiding.
• Charlotte is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
