For years, no British publisher would touch Veronique Olmi's novel about a woman who kills her children. But now it is taking on a life of its own
A play adapted from a French novella about a woman who kills her children is set to become the next cultural phenomenon about the darker side of maternal love when it opens at London's Southbank Centre next month. Beside the Sea began life as Bord de Mer, written by the Paris-based dramatist Véronique Olmi. It has taken 11 years and a team of eminent women to bring this story to the stage.
Beside the Sea focuses on a mother who loves her sons so much and fears the world so greatly that she can't bear for them to live in it. Olmi says it was "inspired by four lines I read in the newspaper: a mother killed both her children after taking them to the fair and buying them some chips. The contradiction between the monstrous act of killing her children and taking them out and buying them chips – a nice, loving, pleasing action – was incomprehensible. This is precisely what writing is about: trying to reach humanity in the mystery of inhumanity. I decided to write through the eyes of the mother, getting inside the logic of an infanticidal woman."
Bord de Mer was a bestseller in France and Germany when it was published in 2001, and received positive critical coverage for its bravery and artistry. It was translated into 15 languages across Europe. However, British publishers proved unwilling and no one bought it.
Translator Adriana Hunter found Olmi's novella in 2006 during a work trip to Paris, and was so struck by it that she translated it into English in her own time – the only time she has ever done so in a career spanning more than 50 books. She describes its impact: "A lot of the book's hypnotic quality derives from Olmi's ear for the spoken word. I could hear the narrator's voice, and I could picture her – picture her apartment, smell the cooking smells and the fustiness of her bedroom on the days she couldn't get out of bed. For me, the subject isn't a woman who kills her children, it's a woman who's not coping with the world. She loves her boys and she can't bear to release them into that hostile world."
She doesn't feel the book is controversial: "It apportions no blame. It gets right inside the head of someone who does the unthinkable, and you come out of it sympathising with her, rather than hating her. It may not be an evil act; it may be an act of desperation or a misguided act of love. All parents will have moments of despair and feelings of inadequacy, though not all will admit to them. Some will have months and years of those feelings."
For four years, Hunter received rejections from English publishers unwilling to take on the project. Then she met Meike Ziervogel, who had just set up the Peirene Press for sophisticated literary fiction in translation, at a London Book Fair seminar on "Marketing Difficult Books".
Bord de Mer was published by Peirene as Beside the Sea in 2010, nine years after its original release. Ziervogel says she recognised its importance immediately: "The story depicts the destructive side of maternal love. It's like a Greek tragedy: it personifies a psychological power which we all too often deny. That's why we like to think of women who kill their children as monsters. And that's why I believe this book arouses such strong responses. Yet after reading Beside the Sea, I felt strangely happy. The book had given me the right to contemplate an aspect of motherhood that society wishes to ignore. The mother in the book is not a monster, nor are her children. She kills them out of love, because she is incapable of realising that her children's reality is a different one from her own. Our society assumes that maternal love is wholly positive, that as long as a mother loves her children, she will do them no harm."
Ziervogel says the initial reaction to the book was extreme: "A couple of weeks before the book was released, I asked a friend if her reading group would be willing to read it, and to allow me to sit in. The eight women – all in their forties, and all mothers – kindly agreed. With the exception of one, they hated the book. Bad writing, bad story, bad blurb, bad picture. They didn't leave a stone unturned. It was the first time I realised that I was about to publish a book that some people might not be able to handle, that this will hit such a deep core with some that they will simply look away. Then the reviews came. With the exception of the Guardian, none of the reviews addressed the subject matter. Again, I was amazed. How can you discuss this book without mentioning that it is about a mother who kills her two children?"
Beside the Sea was reprinted after three months, and longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2010. Last week it was announced that it has won the Scott Moncrieff prize for best translation from French.
But this is not the end of the story for this unusual work of fiction, because next month it will be performed as a monologue, thanks to the involvement of another group of women. When Ziervogel was planning her first book launch back in 2010, Geraldine D'Amico, the director of Jewish Book Week, suggested she invite the actor Lisa Dwan to give a reading from Beside the Sea. D'Amico had seen Dwan perform Beckett's dramatic monologue Not I in 2009, and envisioned Beside the Sea as a companion piece. She put Dwan in touch with Ziervogel, and the reading took place.
Dwan was immediately captivated: "Meike sent me the book, and I read it all in one sitting on my iPhone. I was absolutely devastated by it. It unlocks you from the inside." She was intrigued by the circumstances of the central character's life: "What are the conditions that make someone do something like that? I feel we're all on the scale, and it's about how the stars are aligned, the series of events in a person's life and how people fall through the cracks in society. I don't think any of us can afford to be too cocky about these conditions. I hear the palpable fear of the world in this monologue, and I don't hear a caricature at all. That's why people are unnerved by it. Terrible acts seem like rational decisions when you're pushed into a corner, when your whole life is a series of awful events that seem to be out to personally persecute you. You stay in that horror until something gives in."
Following the book launch, the Southbank Centre's artistic director, Jude Kelly, invited Dwan to perform the work at a literature festival in the summer of 2011. Dwan says that "three people couldn't handle it and left. When the lights went up, everyone was devastated."
Dwan persuaded the Southbank to let her produce and develop the work as a one-woman play. She went to Paris to negotiate the stage rights, winning them after a long and rigorous talk which involved her giving Olmi a performance of her interpretation. "I was alone in Paris, I wanted to celebrate," says Dwan. "I skipped down the street having just bought the rights to probably the most depressing play in the world. I don't drink or smoke so I went into a taxidermist's and bought a stuffed duck."
Actor Diana Quick put her in touch with director Irina Brown, who agreed to direct her performance.
So why has it taken so long to get to this point when a few more people might encounter Olmi's work, when far more brutal and violent stories, especially in the cinema, have become ubiquitous? "The brilliance of Véronique's writing is that you become intimately acquainted with the speaker's thoughts. You're charmed by her, you understand her, you feel her vulnerability, but simultaneously you get to know the boys. You see them more clearly than she sees them," Dwan says.
Olmi says she had one piece of advice for the actor: "Don't cry during the monologue. If somebody must cry, it's the audience, not you. This woman has no self-awareness, she does not try to understand or analyse herself. She is much further in than that. She's within the tragedy."
Beside the Sea will be performed by Lisa Dwan at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London, 7 & 8 March.
Mummy dearest? … Classic literature about mothers who kill their children
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Shriver's bestseller, recently turned into a film starring Tilda Swinton, is the modern classic of maternal aggression although the central female character does not kill anyone. In letters to her estranged husband, ordinary mother Eva Katchadourian confronts her claustrophobia, her ambivalence about motherhood and her dislike of her own son. He absorbs and internalises these feelings, adds a dose of rage and commits a high-school massacre.
Medea by Euripides
In this Greek myth Medea has been abandoned by her husband Jason, who wants to advance in society by marrying King Creon's daughter Glauce. Medea exacts revenge by killing Glauce with poisoned gifts (Creon chooses to die by his daughter's side), coldly murdering her own children and leaving on a dragon-pulled chariot.
Adam Bede by George Eliot
Farm girl Hetty is "seduced" by squire Arthur, doesn't know what to do and abandons the resulting baby, who dies. She is caught, sentenced to execution for murder, then spared and sentenced to exile. In exile, she dies. There's another plotline about hero preacher Dinah, and Adam's brother, Seth, who marry and live happily ever after.
Beloved by Toni Morrisson
In Morrisson's gothic masterpiece, a woman named Sethe kills her daughter rather than see her live through another generation of slavery and abuse. In a truly creepy twist, the spirit of the baby returns to Sethe's house, embodying the rage and despair of the slave experience, before being exorcised by a choir of women. This ghost is Beloved.