This little book full of big questions is the first by French novelist Dominique Barbéris to be translated into English, though she’s well-established in her home country, and well-awarded too - this novel was shortlisted for the Prix Femina and longlisted for the Prix Goncourt. That in itself tells you something about the difference between British and French literary culture: here, prize shortlists tend to be books that are big either in length or subject, whereas this quiet, slim volume could slip by unnoticed if you weren’t paying attention.
Not the least of its evasive qualities is that the title alludes to the French film Les dimanches de Ville d’Avray (Sundays and Cybèle in English), though the film and book have little in common. What A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray, beautifully rendered into English by John Cullen, does have is a cinematic, atmospheric quality in its descriptions of the languid Parisian suburb where the action takes place, insofar as there is any action.
The atmosphere is of time and of place. Narrator Jane leaves Paris to make a rare visit to her sister, Claire Marie, in Ville-d’Avray, west of the city: on “the immobility of an autumn Sunday”, with “the still air full of the peace proper to the beginning of autumn” and the strains of her niece’s piano practice drifting through the window as she approaches. This sensory shorthand – flower smells, piano sounds – is part of the book’s successful blend of ease and tension.
The sisters rarely see each other, which means that when they do meet, there is either not much to talk about or an awful lot. This time, there will be no shortage. “On Sundays,” Claire Marie tells Jane, “certain things come back to you more than on other days. On Sundays, you think about life.” In particular, she thinks about an episode that she has never before disclosed, about a man she encountered 15 years before, when she was filling in as secretary at her husband’s medical practice.
The details of what happens between Claire Marie and the man she meets – Marc Hermann – are less important than the ripples they send out, starting in Claire Marie’s mind. “Everybody has several lives, did you know that?” Marc tells her. And the cool, detached tone Barbéris uses makes the events seem inevitable and the decisions faultless.
The story of Claire Marie and Marc is woven through with other elements on the theme of infiltration: a burglary in the neighbourhood; a suspicious stranger seen as a threat to children. (When Jane encounters him, “he was eating a piece of wet bread, which he hid when he saw her” – a perfect evocation of her disgust.) It is also woven through with the cultural experiences throughout Jane and Claire Marie’s lives: Jane Eyre, Gérard de Nerval and a repeated refrain from the poem Autumn Song by Théophile Gautier: “Rain bubbles on the garden pond/ The swallows gathered on the roof/ Confabulate and correspond.”
One reason why Jane rarely visits her sister is that her husband dislikes the bourgeois Ville-d’Avray, believing it to contain the seed of its own downfall, “the void yawning just behind it”, and that this will infect her. Barbéris’s cautious but tense novel is a subtle game of hide and seek with that void and how it plays on the “fragile peace” of life, “so fleeting that we’re frightened of losing it”.
• A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Dominique Barbéris, translated by John Cullen, is published by Daunt Books (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
