Our Precious Wars

The narrator of Perrine Tripier’s novel Our Precious Wars, translated from French by Alison Anderson, has spent her entire life in the same house tucked away in the woods in the French countryside, first with her parents and three siblings, then, for many decades, alone. Now, near death, she reflects not on a life well lived, but on the memories that will die with her.

Tripier’s narrator, Isadora, is disappointed by her own torment. “I can sense how annoyed I would have been, as a child, by the person I am now, encumbered by everything that no longer exists,” Isadora says. “I would have hated this puppet theater I constantly evoke to replay dead images.” And yet that is all that is left to her: her memories of a golden age in a magical place that was so fleeting and so fragile that she spent the rest of her life trying to hold on to it.

The novel is organized by the seasons—Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring—but within those sections time doesn’t move chronologically. Rather, each season is populated by Isadora’s accumulated memories and experiences. This structure lends Isadora’s narrative both forward momentum—she narrates her childhood and the various turning points of her life with clarity, so it is easy to follow her evolution—and a looping, obsessive quality. The story comes together in episodes, glimpses and flashes of emotion as Isadora sifts through the wreckage of her life to “bring back the places I loved so much, which I knew by heart.” Tripier’s prose itself is dense with feeling: the rituals and games that marked Isadora’s childhood are narrated with aching detail, and her descriptions of the nature surrounding the House are particularly lush: “The branches intertwined above our heads dripped slowly, placing the liquid tips of their invisible fingers on our hair, beading it with rain.” Tripier’s style makes Isadora’s obsession with the strangeness and magic of the non-human world tangible—how could she leave this place? Why would she want to be anywhere else?

There is something unsettling about Isadora’s attachment to the House. Even as a child, Isadora recalls, she looked forward to the moment the older generation would disappear, when she would be “alone at last to wander solemnly through the corridors, with the weight of the dead on my shoulders.” Unlike her siblings, she does not dream of escaping or discovering the world; all she wants is “to stay there, nestled in the hollow of familiar things, to submit to the burnishing of time, just like the banister on the spiral staircase.” Isadora rejects the forward motion of time, seeming to submit to a kind of stasis and death in the House; she is trying to preserve her childhood, and the place that housed it, in amber.

Indeed, the world outside the House is uninteresting, illogical, threatening. “I always felt inadequate, incomplete, away from the House. As if a part of me were embedded in its walls,” Isadora says. She is certain that she will not find a place for herself anywhere else, a feeling that intensifies when her younger sister Harriett dies in a motorbike accident, when Isadora is in her early thirties. Isadora only truly felt “full and whole” with her sister’s head resting on her shoulder; bereft, she clings even more fiercely to the House.

Tripier’s portrait of Isadora is tender; she allows Isadora to doubt, to contradict herself, to express grief, fear, and rage—those intense, unattractive emotions that make others uncomfortable. Her siblings and their friends, and the role they play in the life of the House, are sketched vividly, filtered through Isadora’s memories of both their childhood innocence and the way they later change and disappoint her. She prefers to think of them as they were: “I’m a memory, a world. Inside me, little Klaus, Louisa, and Harriett are running, with their gaze the color of a murky pond. Those children live only in me now.” Isadora herself can be hard to grasp. At times she seems laudably honest, sensitive, selfless; at others, she is obsessive, egotistical, immature. When her mother is dying at a nearby clinic, Isadora refuses to visit or say goodbye: “It wasn’t my Petite Mère, in that place, groaning in a dead room,” she reasons. “Staying in the House meant staying by her, the real her, but of course no one else saw it that way.”

Tripier, who wrote this novel—her debut—at just 24, powerfully evokes the nostalgia of childhood and the magic that is lost with time. But she is also brutally clear-eyed about how this feeling, this deep love for something irretrievable, can ripen and rot. Death is everywhere, even in the sweaters Isadora pulls out of wardrobe in winter, which she realizes were knit by hands that “were now being digested by the juices of death under eighteen shovelfuls of earth.” In winter, when she is much older and living in the House alone, she describes becoming “a shadow:” the shadow of a ghoul, a harpy, a banshee, whatever, a creature that doesn’t even know if it is alive.” She feels a shiver of pleasure at this solitude, and is “captivated by [her] sunken cheeks, cold hands, bluish lips.” The world of the novel oscillates between idyllic and claustrophobic; Isadora’s solitude both satisfies and terrifies her. Isadora is in some ways freer than most—she doesn’t work, and lives according to the seasons and her whims—and in others more beholden: to the House, to the past, to her fears.

The great pleasure of this haunting novel is the exquisitely warped world it creates and its insistence on the strange, complicated grief of growing up. Isadora, arguably, never does. She lives stubbornly, according to her own code, her childhood loyalties and imagination—even when the result is despair, delusion, isolation. “I don’t know why I’m like this, why I perpetually want to relive everything,” Isadora says toward the end of the book. “Staying was my way to resist obliteration, oblivion.” She spent her life waging a battle against the inevitable passing of time, but she was, ultimately, alone on the battlefield.