Hunting & Gathering by Anna Guvalda " Ensemble, c'est tout"

Hunting and Gathering is a surprising Story plot from Anna Gavalda's works. In the begining I didn't appreciate it but after reading four play i returned to it & found it quiet nice, good work & plot, at the end I liked her way of writing As I liked stephanie meyer in the host.


This is some of her works Me & wanda want to read it and I think we will be searching for these books which are :

1-Where Someone I Loved .
2-I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere .

I think Anna Guvalda work offered dark explorations of love, denied, or the road not taken,
Hunting is an airy romp through all things.

French.Twenty-six year old Camille Fauque works on a night cleaning crew. Home is a maid's room in an ancient apartment building. This seventh floor studio is miniscule, unheated, crumbling. The lavatory is “Turkish”: a shared squat toilet topped by a showerhead. To wash, Camille pushes a grate over the toilet. At one meter seventy three height, she weighs 48 kilos and is dedicated less to anorexia than eradicating her existence. Her life is comprised of working, smoking and avoiding her mother's phone calls.


A terrible past -- the only true tension in the story -- is intimated and gradually revealed.


When Camille falls ill from malnutrition and exhaustion, she is rescued by her neighbor, Philibert Marquet de La Durbellière.


"Philou" lives on the first floor of Camille's building in an enormous, equally ancient apartment. Stuttering, obsessive, afflicted with tics, 36 year old Philou is a history buff too overcome to do more than sell postcards and babysit the magnificent flat, currently ensnared in a family legal dispute.


Philou's character represents the book's greatest failure. A complex, charming creation, he is much involved with Camille early on, tending her as she recovers, reading to her, insisting she join him and his roommate, Franck, in his apartment, which offers niceties like heating and plumbing.


But Philou's early ministrations, along with his tongue-tied presence, fade into the background as Franck Lestafier overtakes the plot.A boorish, hotheaded, sexy chef, Franck is given to drinking, drugging and womanizing when not slaving away in the kitchen, where, we are told, he is quite talented.


Gavalda devotes a great deal of energy to Franck's working life, offering readers many pages of luscious French food porn.


Of course Franck and Camille take an immediate dislike to one another, leading - unsurprisingly -- to a simmering sexual tension.


The book's gives length to Camille: we learn Camille is a hugely gifted artist with a demanding, selfish mother.Her father is dead.


Franck is the product of a one-night stand. He was raised by his beloved grandmother, Paulette, now succumbing to the depredations of age. Unable to care for her, Franck is forced to put her into a nursing home, a move devastating to them both.

Philou is the sole male descendent of an impoverished noble family, heir to only the name.This all sounds sad in the telling, yet the book reads remarkably quickly.

Camille and Franck's sufferings are given almost by rote; there is a pervasive sense throughout that everything will work out nicely. At one point Gavalda even steps away from the narrative, addressing the reader George Sand style:
It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.

I kept reading, waiting for the Terrible Event, or the Unexpected Death, or the Big Secret that Turns the Plot to happen. But the Big Thing never transpires.
Instead, Camille and Franck engage in their dance, drawn together, then apart in the inexorable push-pull of a novel.

Philou is conveniently whisked offstage for a protracted family visit in the country. Even when he finally reappears, he remains serenely oblivious to Franck and Camille's fierce circlings.The combination of Philou's affection and Franck's home cooking returns Camille to life: she begins drawing again, focusing her talents on the apartment. The place is stuffed with old linens, bottles of quinine, top hats, silver, empty perfume bottles, old letters, ancestral portraits, and a bathroom dating to 1894. The rambling space exists outside time, an enchantment. Camille fills sketchbook after sketchbook, much to the delight of dealers Pierre and Mathilde Kessler, who have courted her since art school.

We see more of Franck: while lacking Philou's sophisticated vocabulary, a gentle soul resides beneath the awful manners and constant swearing. He cooks for Camille. He visits Paulette every Monday, his only day off. He genuinely cares for Philou. And he wonders about this strange, skinny, short-haired girl taking up so much of his thinking.But a sense of unreality pervades. Though Franck agonizes over Paulette, Camille and his unhappiness at work, we know his suffering will be short-lived.

As for Camille, despite her difficult past, complete with poor parenting and lousy romantic choices, her life falls into place all too easily. She is attractive, talented, cool. Through all the fights, refusals and empty threats, Gavalda's spare, lovely prose moves us along with the rapidity of a romance.

Things get even better when Camille and Philou convince Franck to bring Paulette back to the apartment, where Camille becomes her willing caregiver. Even Philou, the easiest target for sorrow, finds happiness -- and love -- in theatre school, where his idiosyncrasies are welcomed.

Perhaps I am too much of a cynic; perhaps my tastes are too dark. But Gavalda is a fine writer whose earlier work plumbed the depths of quiet desperation (not necessarily just the English way). But not here. Hunting ends in grand style, Love, an inheritance, passionate sex, babies, a chic gastropub, a house in the country: check each box, for all apply.

well the next are paragraphs from the book that I liked:
" A sudden wave of wearness came over her.she was sick of all this talk about her weight, downright fed up.for nearly twenty seven years everyone had been bugging her about it. Couldn't they just change the record?She was here, for god's sake! She was alive,after all. Doing as much anyone else. She was cheerful, sad, brave, vulnerable and exasperating as any other young woman. there was a person inside her! There was somebody there!"
here she was thinking of her self when she was at doc.

that next paragraph Philou was trying to explain her beauty by giving the next example, which I liked
"The entire court, with the exception of Madame d'Etampes, agreed that Diane de poitier was simply ravishing. All the ladies copied the way she walked, her gestures, her hairstyles.
she served, in fact, to establish the canon of beauty, one which all women for over a hundred years, would seek in deperation to emulate :
Three white things: skin, teeth & hands.
Three black: eyes,eyebrows & eyelids.
Three red: lips,chicks & nails.
Three long: body,hair & hands.
Three short: teeth, ears & feet.
Three narrow: mouth,waist & toes.
Three wide: arm, thighs & claves.
Three small: nipples, nose & head."
rather nicely put, well that was in the past what about today beauty how we would listed?? :)))

In here franck try to explain hi life to his grandmother paullette well I think in some part it includes all our fast life but in differs from one another but if we thought about about it, will sum our feelings
"nope, itsnot my fault, my only mistake was to choose such a lousy profession.all i do is work like a dog,and you know ? the worst of it is that even if I wanted, there's nothig else I know how to do. Do you even realize that i work everyday do you even realize that I work everyday except mondays? and mondays I come & see you. hey don't act surprised.I told you that I was working extra on sundays to pay my motirbike, so you see I start everyday at eight thirty and in the evening I'm never out of there before midnight. that why I have to sleep in the afternoon or I will never make it.
so you see? that's it, thats my life: nothing.I do nothing.I see nothing. I know nothing and the worst is I understand nothing.............................."

then that's it, I won't make any longer in this book there are a lot of nice thing that could touch our life like the grand mother who was put into a house for old people, who waits her grandson, and doesn't want to be there, Paullete charcter remind us with our grand mothers, actully it remind me with my grand mother.
cruelty of not understanding parents also exist in this book, shown in many different ways but also loving parents are shown
Mistakes of people, their regrets, their despair, Hope & love & friendship all put together

Meanwhile, Hunting and Gathering, were translated into English by Allison Andreson from the original French version, Ensemble, c’est tout, is perfect beach reading
I Highly recommend it. Bon Appetit. :)))