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It is into this extended family come proto commune that Lo is born. She is far from the first of the children and grandchildren by the time she comes along, and she has plenty of adults to love and look after her. Too much love, maybe, her mother will say later.
Then, her mother spoke maybe as one who wasn't given too to much love.
They live in their rambling house in the village that isn't really a village, but merely 'the outskirts', near the lake. It's a safe place to grow up in many ways, but everywhere has its dangers.
I'm giving no more away than the blurb by talking of Lo's fifteenth birthday and the Tivoli gardens and a whirlwind afternoon and evening, and a night which changes everything for ever: between them and for each of them.
I feel that I should love this book and yet I can't quite grasp it.
As a story of a misunderstood relationship, a failure to communicate, lost love, lost innocence, missed opportunities, a break with safety and a bid for freedom, an analysis even of what it means to be truly free, it could have been brilliant. Parts of it genuinely are. But for me the whole just doesn't hold together.
The structure fails it. It flits backwards and forwards. Lo is our narrator for most of it, but she skips between then and now (and maybe somewhere in between - the chronology is something you have to work out for yourself).
Perhaps I found the laden imagery to over-powering: her axe-wielding mother, long into the blind old age, her deserting father who could walk on water ""''no matter how thin the ice""''.
There are many moments of sheer beauty, that I won't spoil by taking them out of context, and some powerful images. Snippets of wisdom too.
''First I had a taste of sex, then of solitude, relished it like a thirst I had suppressed and now could not quench. Began to guard it like stolen goods."" '' There is something inescapably Nordic about that, but also something that should have struck home for me more forcefully than it did.
The title is an homage to the Belmondo / Seberg film, which may have greater significance if you're more familiar with it than I am.
