La señorita Haas

In Miss Haas, Michèle Audin builds a beautiful and powerful choral novel with the lives of thirteen women, anonymous although with the same last name, Haas, and the same space-time: the France that, between 1934 and 1941, entered radicalization and the rise of fascism, World War II, and the deportation of Jews to death camps. As she already did in her magisterial Una vida breve (Peripheral, 2020), Audin uses memory and truthful chronicle, combining them with a powerful formal inventiveness. True to the experimentation of the OuLiPo group (the Potential Literature Workshop, to which authors such as Georges Perec or Raymond Queneau belonged, and of which she herself is a member), each chapter chooses a different narrative perspective and becomes a style lesson. The result, Miss Haas, is the true novel of those ordinary women, young workers who did not have anyone they wanted to tell about their lives: their minimal gestures and their pride, the harassment they suffer, their family situations, the brutalization of work, their dreams. and expectations. In short, his silent tragedy.