Charlotte. David Foenkinos
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David Foenkinos is an award-winning French novelist and screenwriter. Charlotte, inspired by the life of Charlotte Salomon won the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens; it has sold more than half a million copies in France and been translated into nineteen languages.
Sam Taylor previously translated HHhH, by Laurent Binet, and is the author of the novels The Island at the End of the World, The Amnesiac and The Republic of Trees. He lives in France and the United States.
Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin, 1917. Unknown in her lifetime, she was one of Germany's great modern artists. Her greatest achievement was Life? or Theatre? A Song-play - an autobiographical series of 769 works, which she painted over two years in the South of France while in hiding from the Nazis. It has gone on to inspire films, plays and an opera. Salomon died in Auschwitz in 1943, gassed along with her unborn child shortly after her arrival.
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2014 Èditions Gallimard, Paris
English translation copyright © 2016 by Sam Taylor
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This edition first published in the United States in 2016 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street, New York NY 10012
Quote from On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin, from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, published in 2003 by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 796 4
eISBN 978 1 78211 795 7
Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate.
—FRANZ KAFKA, Diary
This novel is inspired by the life of Charlotte Salomon.
A German painter murdered at the age of twenty-six, when she was pregnant.
My principal source is her autobiographical work, Life? or Theater?
Contents
Part One
1
Charlotte learned to read her name on a gravestone.
So she wasn’t the first Charlotte.
Before her, there had been her aunt, her mother’s sister.
The two sisters were very close, until one evening in November 1913.
Franziska and Charlotte sing together, dance and laugh together.
But never to excess.
There is always a reserve to their displays of happiness.
Perhaps this is linked to their father’s personality.
An intellectual, strict and unyielding, with an interest in art and antiques.
For him, nothing could be more fascinating than a handful of Roman dust.
Their mother is gentler.
But it is a gentleness tinged with sorrow.
Her life has been a series of tragedies.
But more on that later.
For now, let’s talk about Charlotte.
The first Charlotte.
She is beautiful, with long dark hair like a promise.
It all begins with the slowness.
Little by little, she does everything more slowly: eating, walking, reading.
Something inside her is slowing down.
Her body, I imagine, being infiltrated by melancholy.
The kind of melancholy that devastates, that never goes away.
Happiness becomes an island in the past, unreachable.
But nobody notices the arrival of this slowness in Charlotte.
It is insidious.
People compare the two sisters.
One simply smiles more than the other.
At most, someone might remark the occasional daydream that goes on too long.
But night is taking over her.
The night she must wait for, so that it can be her last.
It is such a cold November night.
While everyone else is sleeping, Charlotte gets out of bed.
She gathers a few belongings, as if she’s going on a trip.
The city seems at a standstill, frozen in this early winter.
Charlotte has just turned eighteen.
She walks quickly toward her destination.
A bridge.
A bridge she loves.
The secret locus of her darkness.
She has known for a long time that it will be the last bridge.
In the black night, unseen, she jumps.
Without the slightest hesitation.
She falls into the icy water, her death an ordeal.
Her body is found early the next morning, washed up on a riverbank.
Completely blue in places.
Her parents and her sister are woken by the news.
The father is paralyzed, utterly silent.
The sister weeps.
The