Tita

by Marie Houzelle

  A lot of reading is going on around Tita, of many kinds, from the Latin mass at school to photo novels in the kitchen, from fashion magazines to the local newspaper, from thrillers to Gide or Stendhal.

  Her interest in books is one aspect of her passion for words and their combinations. Her brother Etienne insists on precision; her sister Justine favours outlandish locutions; for her grandmother, “words are just tools to help get things done”; her mother “never pays much attention to words”, and her words (as a consequence?) are often “at odds with the facts”. There’s also her “wooden” ballet teacher (“You always know what she’s going to say”).

  For Tita, words are alive, each one has its music, its color, its texture, its taste. To get to know them more intimately, she spends a lot of time in dictionaries — not so much the encyclopaedic kind, which could instruct her about things, as the ones that concentrate on the words themselves, their journeys through time and across languages, the changes in their spellings and pronunciations. She delves into Grevisse’s Le Bon Usage every time her teacher “makes a dubious assertion about French”. Tita’s favorite occupation is “to think about words”.

  In spite of good relationships with friends and family, Tita often feels like an unfortunate oddity. In the worst situations, books allow her to escape into other places and approach individuals who feel like kindred spirits. They introduce her to a larger world. They also inspire her to invent her own stories, the ones she tells her younger sister and the ones she produces as plays with her friends. And the draft of her latest play is what leads to the solution of a serious predicament.

  5 GIFTED CHILDREN

  Are there programs for gifted children in France? Is Tita’s experience typical of the gifted child’s experience in France? What exists for gifted children?

  I don’t know much about gifted children. I never thought of Tita as a particularly gifted child. She’s precocious in school and as to language, handicapped in other ways (unable to dress herself or eat on her own, bad at drawing, tennis and ballet).

  In France, middle-class parents often try to get their precocious (or allegedly precocious) children into elementary school a year ahead of the rest. Later on, a clever child who is bored and defies teachers can skip a year, sometimes two. It’s also pretty usual for a child who doesn’t do well to repeat a year. These are the main ways most schools seem to deal with any kind of problematic students.

  Tita’s progression, in a small private school with only two classes for all the children between 2 and 14 years old, is easy, almost seamless. A problem only arises when she’s ready for secondary education and wants to leave that school.

  6 CUGNAC

  Many readers have commented on your beautiful evocation of a lost world. Is that how you feel about Cugnac? Is it a real place?

  Cugnac is inspired by the small southern town where I grew up. I lived there until I was fourteen.

  When my children were small, they often asked about it. They always wanted more stories, so I had to devise developments and variations. My fictional tales soon became sharper than the original memories.

  I’ve never felt any nostalgia for my childhood or its backdrop. I enjoy cities: their wonder and variety, their countless, exotic social constellations.

  Still, as it turns out, I’ve now lived for many years in a town, just outside Paris, that’s much bigger than Cugnac but where I probably enjoy a similar social ambience. It takes me ten minutes on my bicycle to get to the National Library, twenty to Notre-Dame, and I have something to do in Paris practically every day. But in Ivry too the local life is intense, with music, cinema, library, politics, outdoor markets, art gallery, yoga, cafés, and lots of intriguing neighbors.

  There are even grape vines across the street in the Parc Départemental. In my small yard, an olive tree and a fig tree.

  7 FRANCE PROFONDE

  What is “la France profonde”? How do you think it has changed since the 1950s?

  The expression usually denotes, in an ironic tone, the alleged “real people” from the provinces, the opposite of what sophisticated Parisians stand for. It can also, more seriously and maybe positively, designate the rural, rooted, traditional way of life, as opposed to a multicultural, globalized culture.

  I don’t think it could ever evoke the southern society described in Tita, then or now. At least from the times when the Romans annexed Gallia narbonensis (capital: present-day Narbonne) on their way to the Iberian Peninsula in the 2d century BC, the south of France has been open, linguistically and culturally, to European and Mediterranean traffic and exchanges. It has long resisted centralization and it can be seen as the opposite of Paris in many ways, but certainly not as traditional vs. modern, or deep vs. smart.

  8 OCCITAN

  Occitan is actually spoken by Tita and her neighbors. What is it compared to French? What is its place in France? What outlook do you see for Occitan?

  Occitan , like Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian and the other Romance languages, is derived from oral Latin. It was the main language spoken in southern France and in parts of Spain and Italy until the end of the 18th century.

  The Troubadours, who sang their Occitan poems in many medieval European courts, created the first literary works in a Romance language. Occitan literature, after many ups and downs, is still alive even if, from the 16th century, langue d’oïl (i.e. northern French) became the dominant administrative and literary language of France,

  The French Revolution saw linguistic diversity as a threat to national unity; subsequent governments did their best to eliminate it. From 1882, compulsory education speeded up the process: in schools all over the country, the children who went on speaking local languages, even in the schoolyard, were punished and shamed.

  In the late 1950s Tita grows up in a country where, for the first time, most of the population has been made to learn French in elementary school.

  In rural areas, the six or seven years spent in school mean that everybody can read French, write it and interact in it, but Occitan, in the south, remains the main or only language of daily life.

  In cities as well as in small towns like Cugnac, everybody speaks French at least part of the time, especially among the middle and upper class. Usually, subjects like national politics, ideas, school, films, fashion, are discussed in French; Occitan is preferred for local news, morals, gossip, family matters, the weather, and proverbs.

  The fifties are a transition period, when Occitan is still alive as a main or secondary language, despised by some and seen by others as precious and endangered. Interest in local languages and lore will grow as these tend to disappear with urbanization, the influence of television completing the effect of universal education.

  In the 21st century, you seldom hear Occitan on city streets or village squares. But the language is now treasured, and studied. Like twelve other regional languages (e.g. Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Basque), you can learn it in many secondary schools. There are even quite a few bilingual nursery and elementary schools. Universities teach its history and its literature, from the Troubadours to a rich array of contemporary novels, plays, poems and songs.

  9 CATHOLIC

  Tita’s Catholic education is at the centre of her story. Is her path one that many people could identify with?

  Tita may appear devout because she’s enthusiastic about ceremonies, incense, flowers, music. She’s inspired by the idea of a different life: early in the morning when she walks to mass before the town is awake, as a hermit maybe when she grows up, in heaven when she dies. A life before or without food, or even without a body.

  But she’s puzzled about all the “sin, fault, and iniquity”, she has a strong dislike for the Sacred Heart, she doesn’t seem to take martyrs too seriously, and she sounds more than sceptical about the miracles of Lourdes.

  Tita attends a Catholic school because, traditionally, people who belong to her father’s social group send their children to Catholic schools, whether they’re practising
Catholics or not.

  Tita’s parents happen to have no interest in religion. Her father even seems repulsed by it. Her mother goes to church on Sundays like her friends, but that’s about it.

  In the late fifties Catholicism is still central to French society, but only a minority of the French population attends mass every Sunday, especially in the south. Meanwhile, Tita learns in school that missing Sunday mass is a mortal sin that can send you directly to hell.

  Soon the Catholic Church will lose its predominance. Nowadays, around half of the French population (with wide variations according to polls) still declares itself Catholic, but most of these “Catholics” don’t believe in a personal God, half of them hardly ever set foot in a church, and very few go to mass regularly. Practising Catholics seem to have become a tiny minority, while the proportion of those who declare themselves atheists or agnostics keeps growing.

  10 OLDER

  You published your acclaimed debut novel after the age of fifty. Do you have any advice for older writers?

  When we were around twenty-eight, some of my friends started agonizing: “Soon I’ll be thirty, and I haven’t done anything yet, anything worth mentioning. Isn’t it pathetic?”

  We were hardly thirty-seven when forty began to loom. They looked at their careers. Even the most successful ones were not where they’d planned to be. And after they turned forty, what could they expect?

  Meanwhile, lacking ambition, imagination, and probably a lot more, I was just trying to patch together a living, bring up children, cope with husbands, scribble in public transport, sing in the evening.

  Fifty, and so on. Time to breathe in, look around, find out what it is we actually enjoy doing, and do it.

  Now.

  Table of Contents

  - 1 -

  Stick

  Misfortunes

  Gravel

  Cucumber

  Champagne

  Names

  Currency

  Crocodile

  Cartwheel

  Lyon

  Poppies

  Communist

  Petals

  Artichokes

  Mink

  Idéal

  - 2 -

  Le Bon Usage

  Early Mass

  Petite Fille Modèle

  Eyelash

  Mexico

  Dots and Stripes

  Aperitifs

  English

  Hosts

  My-ex

  Confession

  Black

  Reports

  - 3 -

  Brothers

  Lourdes

  Grotto

  Waterfall

  Squirrel

  Sulk

  Rooftop

  Yes

  Marin

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Early Praise for Tita

  About the Author

  Q&A with Marie Houzelle

  Thank you for reviewing Tita!

  Copyright

  TITA

  American paperback edition first published

  by Summertime Publications Inc (USA) in 2014

  copyright © Marie Houzelle 2014

  Summertime Publications

  cover design by Joëlle Jolivet

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Houzelle, Marie

  Tita / Marie Houzelle 1st edition

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013944782

  Summertime Publications Inc.

  7502 E. Berridge Lane, Scottsdale, AZ 85250

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 9781940333014

  Early Praise forTita

  Like opening the door to a secret garden, TITA transports the reader straight into life in a small town in the south of France during the 1950s, as seen through the eyes of a precocious seven-year-old heroine not soon to be forgotten. Houzelle's prose is unfailingly deft and refreshing. This book is a delight!

  - Anne Korkeakivi, author of An Unexpected Guest

  Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages. Like Louise Fitzhugh's classic Harriet the Spy, the story is powered by a precocious and independent loner whose observations and reports are both charming and moving. Tita is a remarkable debut.

  .- Katharine Weber, author of Triangle and True Confections

  The best book I read this year. Witty, wry, and clever, Tita’s young voice captivated me from the first page. Tita poignantly portrays small-town life as well as the end of the Catholic church’s grip on France, revealing cracks in society that a decade later become the riots of 1968. A rare novel written in English that gives a real taste of French culture. I cannot recommend it enough!

  - Janet Skeslien Charles, author of Moonlight in Odessa

  This book has a charm so unique and powerful, it pulls you in simply, effortlessly, like following a tree lined path on a summery day. The language is utterly original and quietly moving and very very funny and it makes you want to follow Tita onward past the last pages and into the years beyond. I loved it.

  .-Nicola Keegan, author of Swimming

  Marie Houzelle opens a charmed magic casement on a French childhood.

  - Sheila Kohler, author of Dreaming for Freud

  Seven-year-old Tita can tell you the correct rule for whether to put an “e” on tout in every grammatical situation, but she does not recognize the tensions and estrangements that haunt her parents’ marriage…She’s got just enough self-understanding to recognize that her teacher objects to her insolence, but not enough worldliness to realize that the last place for a questioner of authority is a nunnery.

  We’re laughing, but we’re also intrigued by this child whose understanding can be razor sharp or dense as a thicket. Where will this odd combination take her?

  … There’s nothing simplistic about this novel. Tita is not an exercise in blind nostalgia for a lost past. It is a rich and warm, yet open-eyed portrait of a place and time just beyond our current reach. It’s a book worth savoring.

  – Judith Starkston – New York Journal of Books

  In Houzelle's first novel, Tita is a seven-year-old girl growing up in the south of France in the 1950s whose life seems to be defined by obstacles: the many foods that disgust her, the school that fails to challenge her, and parents who struggle to understand her. Tita is precocious and clever, but in some ways painfully inept. She is thoughtful but frail—obsessed with rules and rituals, and determined to understand the nuances. Through Houzelle's sharp, straightforward prose (which captures Tita's perspective), the story of how Tita grows takes center stage. She learns the alternatives to those things that have held her back or held her down. She challenges social strictures that she feels are meaningless. She battles her mother to get what she wants, and when sometimes that turns out to be the wrong decision, she acknowledges it. At the novel's end, Tita is still a little girl, but her brilliance, potential, and unusual way of looking at the world will have won readers over.

  – Publishers Weekly

  Like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Tita, a precocious seven-year-old, finds refuge in books from an often baffling world. Guided by Marie Houzelle’s sharp eye and confident hand, we experience humour, astonishment and delight as we discover life in 1950s provincial France from the viewpoint of a singular child. A triumph of a first novel.

  – Yuriko Tamaki, columnist, the Yomiuri Shimbun.

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  TITA by Marie Houzelle: Paperback: 312 pages, Publisher: Summertime Publications Inc (English), ISBN-13: 978-1940333014,

  PUBDATE EBOOK: December 1, 2014

  For more information, author interviews, lectures and events, please contact Lea Handell, email: handell@summertimepublications.com

  More books about France from Summertime:

  BEST PARIS STORIES,anthology of winners of the International Paris Short Story Contest,ISBN: 978-0982369852, 220 pages

  SORBONNE CONFIDENTIAL, Laurel Zuckerman,ISBN: 978-0615252896; 300 pages

  WWII VOICES:American GI's and the French Women Who Married Them(French-American Stories), Hilary Kaiser; ISBN: 978-0-9823698-3-8 ;