Cursed Bread

“Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.”

This was utterly bizarre, uncomfortable, weird and I LOVED IT! It’s set in semi-rural post-war France and we see the power of emotions like lust and envy and how they can cloud our objective memories of what happened in the past. This centres around the real, unsolved mystery of a mass poisoning in this French village in 1951. In this fictional narrative of events, some believe this mass illness was caused by spoiled or cursed bread, others believe it was from the government.

“I picture you sometimes as a set of Russian dolls, each layer revealing nothing except a tiny, weaker version of yourself, at the end only hollowness. You made yourself a character in your own story, at least as much as I made you a character in mine. Now it’s impossible to know what I was told and what I created.”

We follow Elodie, the widowed wife of the village baker who showed more interest in baking than in her. Then comes the arrival of a rich couple - the Ambassador and his wife, and we then get Elodie’s account of these past events through flashbacks and her letters to Violet, the Ambassador’s wife. Elodie’s viewpoint feels obsessive and dark and I won’t spoil the details more but the intense emotions that cloud her perceptions of these relationships and of the events in the community was so interesting.