Listen by Sacha Bronwasser
Trans. David Colmer. Penguin Books. 2025. 240 pages.
As the old joke goes, you’re not paranoid if there is really someone out to get you. In fact, you can rarely spend a day these days without having the sensation that someone—someone you may not even know—for insane reasons of their own is stalking you, planning an attack on a gathering you might attend. This sense of foreboding drapes over us like a wet sheet, and often we seem to have gotten used to it as merely a part of contemporary life, like auto accidents or flooded underpasses.
The Dutch author Sasha Bronwasser has made a splash with her new novel, Listen, which sold very well in the Netherlands and is slated to be a motion picture. It is somewhat reminiscent of Nobel winner Annie Ernaux’s novels and takes place in Paris, where a Dutch girl (Eloise) has hired on to a bourgeois family as an au pair caring for a girl and a boy. She isn’t notably fluent in French but has some skill in it, and part of the attraction of the summer job is the chance to become more so.
Bronwasser’s Paris is not the romantic city of so many works of fiction but is meticulously portrayed as a working, everyday city. The text comes strangely alive with the mundane objects of quotidian life and free of the melodrama so often introduced by the very word “Paris.” All this is played against the backdrop of terrorism as a constant lurking presence, fed to us by the news media, as it is in the first sentence of the book. How often do we begin the day hearing about yet another mass shooting? How many times must we hear about such events until we are numbed to them?
Terrorism is not just an American phenomenon. The Bataclan attack in Paris in 2015 resulted in ninety deaths, and another forty (at least) were connected with it. This was only a few months after the massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. We have grown a little too comfortable with terrorism’s presence in the world. The newscasters may use elevated language, speaking in dramatic tones, but we have heard of unspeakable acts so many times that these words have been gutted of impact and weakened the shock in almost every other event as well. Each level of horror has become matter-of-fact, and we go about our lives with true horror normalized.
When Philippe (Eloise’s employer in the novel) drifts out of his impassivity and begins to stalk Eloise through the streets, a reader might expect some inner passion is at work, as it would be in ordinary novels, but at the same time, it seems as if he has no particular passion. A father infatuated with the babysitter? It’s what one might expect in a novel, yet even he does not know what is driving him to an encounter with an unexplained, unforeseen act of terrorism.
Will Laurence (the mother) develop a friendship with Eloise that leads to insight and a reckoning with inner truth? That, too, would be a common direction for a novel to take, but Listen seems to imply there is no destiny set aside for us, merely Brownian motion that we delude ourselves into thinking we control. Just who are we, here, today, in this gray chaos? The latter half of Listen engages with photography and the ability of the photograph (or art in general) to create and shape the identity of its subjects as well as the power of the mentor to shape the student.
Yet, despite what might seem to be well-worn topics, Bronwasser keeps the reader in a world that is fresh without being self-consciously so, a quality that, it should be said, is excellently reflected in David Colmer’s translation.
J. Madison Davis
Norman, Oklahoma
