Literature
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The Swiss writer dislodged by her ex-husband recounts, in “La Fortune”, her rural exile in Haute-Savoie.
It starts with a defeat and ends with a victory. A defeat: at the start of the wealth, Catherine Safonoff moved to Haute-Savoie, near the Swiss border, in a wing of Mélie and Jeff’s farm, one morning in June 2021. She didn’t want it. She had lived for twenty-five years in a house owned by her ex-husband, and he sold it. She had searched for a long time, she had finally found what she needed, financed the necessary work with the money inherited from her father. But “the basic sum” had been paid by the one she calls here “Mr B.», professor of neurophysiology at the University of Geneva. He was Léon in Escape Distance (Zoé, 2017), where he came too often to visit her in this very house, which she never thought she would have to leave one day.
In six lines, Catherine Safonoff states the facts around which a large part of her work is woven, from the first novel, Esme’s Partpublished in 1977 and reprinted in paperback at the same time as the wealth. “I wanted to live in this house, I wanted it as if it were my right, an unwritten, unaccounted right, let’s say, as compensation for the invisible tasks of a wife and mother at home, my ex-home, where I was forced to return for years, long after m
