‘I write about families,” Natalia Ginzburg said, “because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” The French-born writer and musician Alba Arikha clearly agrees, and has set her brilliant third novel firmly within the crucible of two families: the one her narrator is born into and the one she makes herself as an adult. The narrator is Clara, who, at the start, is a 16-year-old living in Paris and shares some biographical details with her author. (But not the fact her godfather was Samuel Beckett and she was named after his poem Alba.)
Life doesn’t sit still in your teens, and Clara’s is overturned when her father moves the family to New York for a teaching job. She rages against it (“I was overdoing it with my father. This was important to him. But I couldn’t help myself”), but what makes it worse is meeting the family who are moving out of the house they are moving into. Clara develops a crush on the son, Alexander, and the two hours she spends in his company will colour her life for decades.
