At the beginning of the year, the publishing house "Zepter Bookworld" published the book Woman on the phone French by Karol Five, translated by Bojan Savić Ostojić. Carol Five (1971) published, among other things, the following novels: Let us see the air of a parfait film (Let our lives resemble a perfect movie, 2012), C'est dimanche et je n'y suis pour rien (It's Sunday and what can I do?, 2015), A woman on the phone (Woman on the phone, 2017), Hold on until dawn (Hold out until dawn, 2018), Turpentine (Turpentine, 2020), then Quelque chose à te dire (I have something to tell you., 2022) and The day and time (Day and hour, 2023), mostly published by Gallimar. A sequel to the novel was recently published Woman on the phone, entitled Missed call (Missed call, 2026). During her guest appearance at the "Moliere Days" festival, which was organized by the French Institute in Belgrade in May, "Vreme" was interviewed about the Woman on the Phone.
"WEATHER" The strength of your novel lies in the unique voice of the main character, sixty-three-year-old Charlene. That voice imposes itself without an intermediary and somehow, between the lines, manages to tell a story. How did you arrive at the form in which everything depends on the intonation of that voice?
KAROL FIV: Even before that book, I wrote novels. But when I started writing to Woman on the phone, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to record her phone messages, just to leave a trace. These are actually spoken sentences that I heard and then wrote down, roughly like ready-made.
Since, due to circumstances, I have been dealing with it for several years, dramaturgy appeared to me by itself. I wanted to show how the relationship between mother and daughter develops over time, how mothers age, but also daughters with them. In the book, only Charlene's voice is heard and one can guess what her daughter is responding to. I would not call that form a monologue, but a one-way dialogue.
Charlene is the original.. She imposes herself from her first word and immediately becomes recognizable, close. Your translator had the impression that he heard the voice of his mother or grandmother in her voice. "When are you coming?? When is that soon?? "
I laughed a lot while writing. The fact that the text is based directly on the messages on the answering machine, without didaskalia, allows the reader to project himself and achieve a feeling of strong familiarity. Many readers recognize their mother, father or someone from their family in Charlene. And I wanted to show the ambivalence of the relationship between parents and children. Even when they are unbearable, we like them. Charlene is manipulative, she can be hard-working, and you often feel like hanging up on her in mid-sentence. But at the same time she is very funny, touching. He has language. She embodies the generation called boomers in France. However, she is a boomer, and boomers are often more financially unstable than men. That's why they speak more freely, without filters, they don't have much to lose, and without hesitation they speak out loud about what many keep in their mouths.
Charlene betrays roles reserved for older women: she is happily divorced, smoke, swears, tirelessly seeks a lover. This is not a woman who is silent or who is ashamed of something.
Charlene is really looking for a lover on dating sites. He reads those ads to his daughter, who, as we quickly see, wants nothing to do with it. Then, she fights with her friends and doesn't want to deal with her grandchildren at all. She does not conform to the established narrow frames that are reserved for women. Charlene is actually a woman who married early and is constantly reliving her wasted teenage years. There are, moreover, many women who feel more like wives than mothers - Charlene is one of them. Her age (she is 63 years old) is also a kind of liberation: she is not burdened with domestic responsibilities. He will have an episode with cancer. But even that episode will briefly emphasize the intensity of her life, as if some adventure had befallen her.
The role of a woman who is sexually fulfilled in her prime is reminiscent of Anna Erno, of course, na Simple passion. It is about the status of a woman who "gave back to society". U To the woman on the phone it also shows that Charlene is not an exemplary mother. At one point she says"It's stupid that you're my daughter., I'd rather you were my mother. Life is not fair.. "
Charlene did not fulfill herself as a mother. But at that time it did not occur to women that they could bypass motherhood. It is a taboo of that era. There is also her tendency to leave herself to her children, either due to old age or due to illness, just as if they were her parents. But Charlene always fluctuates between authoritarian outbursts and a childish tone. It is a generation of women who did not always manage to free themselves, although they left behind several feminist victories. The fact that I wrote about boomers made me approach them with more love.
While confessing, Charlene also offers us a portrait of her daughter. The clash between the two generations is full of unwanted comedy. Charlene criticizes the younger generation of women who are dumbed down by work, who would rather go to a psychiatrist than take to the streets to fight for their rights. Is it even possible to talk between those two different codes?
That's right. Charlene's daughter is a lot like me, she's raising her son on her own, and it's clear that Charlene's phone advice isn't much use to her. Charlene suggests that she be more authoritarian, tells her that benevolent upbringing does not work, that her son is uneducated... At the same time, we feel that Charlene's words are gradually liberating her daughter. My generation carries too heavy a parental burden. We all want to treat our children the best, we often overdo it, we exhaust ourselves... Charlene's advice - which roughly boils down to this: let him do his homework on his own, let him watch a series for a while - succeeds in loosening the atmosphere precisely by being out of place. And Charlene is not at all wrong when she says that the revolution does not start in a chat with psychiatrists.
Except for Anna Erno, in The Woman on the Phone we also come across other authors, first of all, Natalie Sarot and Valerie Mrezhen, passages of which are listed as book mottos. "Zepter Bookworld" has published and Everything went well. Emanuele Burnham, author and screenwriter who is also very important to you.
First of all, I am very glad that you translated The Woman on the Phone, since you have already translated Valerie Mrezen, Brigitte Giroud and Emmanuelle Burnem, authors who are very important to me. Sarot was also extremely important: her lyrics "For one yes or one no" or "You don't love yourself" were a starting point for me. Natalie Sarot's strength lies in her radicality, in her work on language: she uses "tropisms" to restore the inner monologue. As for Valery Mrezhen, she also graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and has a very original approach to literature. I would say that in her own way she is reinventing the Ulipov experiment. Recording what people say allows us to understand literature as a resonant box of reality, which is the case in Citrus fruit. Valerie also portrayed unusual characters, but my opinion is that if we pay attention in the right way, everyone has a novel within them. It is enough to let him speak, to listen to what he has to tell us. And when it comes to Emanuele Burnham and Brigitte Giraud, I love their short, concise and intense novels.
Family history is still an important theme in the French literary landscape today. But unlike Carrera or Mauvignier, which are used by epic means and which are extensive, you prefer to deal with that topic in a lapidary way.
I studied philosophy, then fine arts, and for years, before I started writing, I was engaged in painting. But already as a reader I loved short, radical novels. I'm not crazy about romance novels. If something can be said in a hundred pages, then why spend five hundred? Regarding the preference for family novels, although the modern age assures us of individual freedom, it is important to use the family milieu to recontextualize both trauma and sociological-historical determinisms... On the other hand, we as women read too many novels written by men. It is important for female readers to be able to reflect by reading the works of female authors. Family novels are also political.
The saga continues though.. You recently released a sequel., Missed call, in which Charlene shows herself to be even more unpredictable and headstrong.
Charlene's life is basically a "saga" that is summarized every ten years in a hundred pages, I would say that it is still summarized. But in the future, I would like to organize this series of novels as a triptych: the first volume shows her in the sixties, the second in the seventies, and the third, if I am lucky enough to see her there, in the eighties... Women of that age are not represented enough in fiction, and they are very exciting, sometimes so much that you cry with laughter. I'm just interested in them.
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