Hunting and Gathering
Anna Gavalda
Language: English
Pages: 496
ISBN: 159448144X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Prize-winning author Anna Gavalda has galvanized the literary world with an exquisite genius for storytelling. Here, in her epic new novel of intimate lives-and filled with the "humanity and wit" (Marie Claire) that has made it a bestselling sensation in France-Gavalda explores the twists of fate that connect four people in Paris. Comprised of a starving artist, her shy, aristocratic neighbor, his obnoxious but talented roommate, and a neglected grandmother, this curious, damaged quartet may be hopeless apart, but together, they may just be able to face the world.
but I was wondering if she shouldn’t be contacted too. Maybe she could help pay.” “Now you’re being obscene and you know it, Yvonne, it’s not as if you had never met her, either.” “You know, sometimes people change.” “Not her.” Yvonne was silent. “No,” he repeated, “not her. Okay, I’m out of here, I’m running late.” “Good-bye, Franck.” “Uh, Yvonne—” “Yes?” “Can you try to find someplace a little bit cheaper?” “I’ll see, I’ll let you know.” “Thanks.” It was so cold that day that Franck was glad to
among magazines, empty beer 94 Anna Gavalda cans and scraps of paper: pay stubs, complicated recipe cards, the instruction manual for a GSXR and various reminder notices from the tax office. Someone had put a horrible multicolored comforter on the lovely Louis XVI bed, and drug paraphernalia lay at the ready on the fine marquetry of the bedside table. Well, it certainly smelled like the lair of some wild beast . . . At the end of the hall she found the kitchen. It was a cold room, gray and sad,
mother: holidays just irritated her. She worked alone and in silence. Camille didn’t feel like going on with the journey. Might as well face the facts: she wasn’t going to make it. She would go back up there, into Louise Leduc’s room, and check out. At last. * 146 Anna Gavalda A little note on Monsieur Erstwhile Piglet’s desk roused her from her sordid thoughts: Who are you? inquired a cramped, black handwriting. She put down her spray bottle and her dusters, took a seat in the enormous
impossible, and yet Vuillard succeeded. For almost a century, although we have just interrupted her in her reading, this young woman has been looking up at us with a slightly weary movement of her neck, yet her smile is tender, as if to say, “Ah, it’s you?” And there was a little canvas she’d never seen before—not even a canvas in fact, but a sketch. The Goose. An amazing thing. Four gentlemen, two of them in evening dress with top hats, trying to catch a goose. The masses of color, the brutal
to suck up to Charles V, the future emperor, and Marguerite of Austria, the daughter of his former benefactor, because he absolutely had to have the official income continued. “Those were the circumstances. So he was sort of stressed out at the beginning but that didn’t stop him from being the perfect tourist. Amazed by everything he saw—faces, customs, clothing—as he visited his peers, and other craftsmen, admiring their work. He also visited all the churches, and he bought a ton of trinkets