Class Trip

This French novella, translated by Linda Coverdale, was originally published in 1995 under the title ‘La Classe de Neige.’ (A good alternative English title might be ‘The Skiing Trip.’)

Nicolas is a “delicate, timid schoolboy” according to the blurb, the child of over-protective parents, who dreads going on a school skiing trip. The story is told without deviation entirely from Nicolas’s point of view, but all the while the reader is able to perceive the unfolding horror through the child’s innocent observations. (In this sense it reminds me very much of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne).  It is clear from the first paragraph that Nicolas is being emotionally abused by his father and in some ways even by his mother. He is a bundle of unexpressed fears, and has a very intense, one might say over-wrought inner life. There are several long passages in the book which recount the distressing imaginary scenarios (some of them perhaps rather darkly comic) which the boy plays out in his mind.

Apart from the main protagonists,  Patrick the ski instructor takes a prominent role – a very sympathetic character and an antidote to the toxic masculinity that has overshadowed Nicolas’s young life – and Hodkann – a stronger and older boy whose character is an unsettling  mixture of kindness and cruelty.

Emmanuel Carrere has been variously described as the Stephen King of France, and the most important French writer you’ve never heard of. The book gripped me from the first page and I read it in one sitting.

Submitted by Corwyn