After suffering some doubts about Raymond Chandler who was obviously a brilliant writer but completely sidetracked by his own witticisms to actually focus on a story, I needed a break and something that would make reading a pleasure and not a task. A random visit to a local bookshop unearthed this recently published book and suddenly I knew what my next book will be. I did ask myself am I perhaps just carried away with sensationalism, after all its about very well publicised court case that raised a lot of questions, still I wanted to read it and was pleasantly surprised.
As everyone by now probably knows, Gisèle Pelicot was an ordinary, elderly French lady quietely minding her own business and slowly approaching retirement, when her husband Dominique was caught by a security guard filming under three women’s skirts, his phone and computer were seized by police and suddenly his whole secret, double life of a rapist came to the surface. It turned out that for ten years, he was secretly drugging his wife and inviting strangers from the internet to rape her. All this time Gisèle was totally unaware of this, believing her husband loves and supports her, while suffering from strange memory loss and blackouts that she worried were potentially Alzheimer (medical tests assured her nothing was wrong with her). What was specifically hard to take and to understand was that she had lived all this time with a monster who was so close to her and whom she completely trusted - he also took pictures of their daughter sleeping and shared it online.
Chapters dealing with the discovery of crimes and subsequent court case are combined with chapters explaining the family background of both Gisèle and her husband. While at first I thought this will be boring, the background chapters proved to be actually very interesting because it is trough them that Gisèle tries to make sense of their behaviour as a individuals and a couple: she lost her mother at a very young age and always found comfort in a relationship, while her husband comes from the family bruised by violence and had with time unwittingly turned into a copy of his own manipulative and aggressive father.
The writing was surprisingly clear-eyed and not scandalous or salacious at all - whatever was happening while she was drugged, Gisèle herself was not aware of it and had no memory of it. She also refused (until the very last moment during the court case) to watch the taped videos, so her story is more about herself trying to come to terms with decade long abuse than the details of it, it is clear she needed to process this and understand the psychological manipulation that led to this. There were perhaps just one or two things that bothered me along the way: her constant attempts to understand and somehow humanise her monster husband (almost like she cannot give up on memories of previously happy family life) and behaviour of her daughter who comes across as handful and too self-absorbed to actually be of any help during the court case. The whole moment when Gisèle decides not to hide inside the locked court but to open the doors to journalists and TV cameras and expose the rest of sniggering rapists was brilliant and kept me reading deep into the night. Contrary to what I expected, the book actually has an artistic merit.
"I still need to believe in love. I received it intensely and too briefly from my parents, and for a long time I believed that it protected me from everything. I even believed that I knew how to give it. I now know that it comes from a deep wound within me that makes me vulnerable. But I accept that fragility, that risk, still. To fight the emptiness, I need to love."
