Description
Old Oscar Donadieu, a shipbuilder and pil- lar of society in La Rochelle, a small town on the Atlantic coast, ruled his family with an iron hand. Now that his body has been found in the murky waters of the harbor, the family doesn't know what to do.
The oldest son, Michel, has a weakness for yo-yos, food, and secretaries. His wife, Eva, a free-spirited woman, rebels against the boredom of the Donadieu household by wearing kimonos and drinking whiskey with a male friend in her Oriental bedroom.
Michel's seventeen-year-old sister, Martine, will do anything, even marry, to escape this bourgeois prison. Then into the Donadieu gloom steps young, angry, ambitious Phillipe Dargens, the son of a seedy movie house owner. Phillipe is determined to be a wolf in life and not a rabbit.
From his place of honor above the mantel- piece, Old Oscar glowers down on the changes that begin to take place...
In this exquisitely told, engrossing family saga, Simenon strikes at the inanity and emptiness of bourgeois France. ISBN:9780151263103
