How much power do you have over your life? That’s the question Dominique Barbéris raises in her short novel A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray. One Sunday afternoon, two married sisters connect in a garden in Ville-d’Avray. Under the affluent veil of the idyllic suburb in western Paris, in neatly cut grass gardens, lie little molehills filled with regret. While the revelation of a secret between sisters provides the framework for the novel, the story revolves around something bigger and more humane: two seemingly opposed desires, for freedom and for stability.

Barbéris shows a spectrum of conflicting emotions and expectations in the small, intimate moment of revelation between the sisters. The feelings behind the characters’ actions are tinged with melancholy and honesty, without armor. A romantic longing, which started with the projection of teen emotions onto the hero of the soap opera Thierry la Fronde and the mysterious Rochester of Jane Eyre, still fills an emotional void for the older sister, Claire Marie. As a doctor’s wife who sometimes works in her husband’s office, she feels unfulfilled. “What hopes, what expectations remained to her? What could still happen? Would the passing hours simply ‘wound’ her, one by one?” wonders the unnamed narrator, her younger sister.

The novel’s title is a nod to the 1962 film Cybèle ou les Dimanches de Ville-d’Avray, directed by Serge Bourguignon. The film tells the story of the ambiguous relationship between a former war pilot, Pierre, and Françoise, a ten-year-old orphan. Pretending to be her father, Pierre takes the little girl for a walk every Sunday. This wistful and troubled film reminds the narrator, a high school teacher, of her older sister’s life. The latter’s emotional dalliance with a mysterious man mirrored the film, so that it “showed Ville-d’Avray in a strange light, and it conjured up a feeling that was almost uneasy, almost fearful, because the viewer was kept wondering, What can possibly happen? Whatever are they doing?”

The passage of time, the dilation of hours, a daily routine that is timed and unchanged without any notable events happening other than a burglary — such is the perfect neighborhood of Ville-d’Avray. The narrator reflects: “Who really knows us? We say so few things, and we lie about almost everything. Who knows the truth?”

One thing is certain for both sisters: They want to escape the relentless monotony of everyday life. Barbéris contours her characters by honing details. They are messengers of melancholy, boredom, of regret. Through them, Barbéris asks why we cling to memories. For some they are souvenirs of time, while for others they constitute a crossroad, an opportunity to steer life in a different direction.

One protagonist, however, is played up to the hilt: Ville-d’Avray. Barbéris’ vivid imagery of the suburb evokes a tangible atmosphere in which one can smell the cut grass, walk down the peaceful, secluded streets and along the winding paths of the forest of Fausses-Reposes, and linger in the train stations of the Transilien suburban line.

What reads easily has been often achieved with great effort. Barbéris’ deliberate writing style has a quiet cadence. Barbéris digs deeper emotionally when Claire Marie, opening up to her sister, ponders the obstacles to her happiness. Ostensibly simple and restrained, Barbéris’ sentences hide the human shortage within them: “Life’s like that: you make a valiant effort to carry your dreams, yours or those of others.” Through tidy language, a bleakness can be sensed, as here: “The train left again; it was typical of Sunday, all that, the degree of blankness, of slight uncertainty, of vague apprehension.” So understatedly does Barbéris describe her struggling characters that there is room for compassion. While the story unfolds, Barbéris aims to maneuver to the core of human existence: the changes you must dare to make, because life will pass you by if you cling to the shadows of the past and the inadequacy of your memories.

A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray lacks palpable action, and the prose is sometimes stripped of the convention of tension; precisely because of that, it’s so effective. With a pulsating melancholic undercurrent, Barbéris unveils universal thoughts hidden in plain sight and gives the reader a moment of reflection.

The aforementioned Sunday afternoon, in which a veil is lifted between sisters, is an interlude in the narrator’s life. Fiction, you know, tells sometimes more truths than reality.

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