Crazy Genie

Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France, among farms, vineyards, and wheatfields. Her grandparents’ house is nearby, beyond a hill of white sand overrun by foxes, but she and her mother are not welcome there. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms and houses to do what work there is to be done—pruning vines, husking corn, feeding livestock, making sausages and preserves. When farmers and villagers greet the woman, she says nothing, and keeps walking.

Once, she was lighthearted, a lovely girl from one of the best families in the valley; but now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits at the edge of the fields, or in the corners of dark kitchens, yearning for her mother to turn from her work and notice her; longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.  “I wanted to love her every minute of my life, so that she would want me,” Marie thinks. “I followed her everywhere. She would say: ‘Get out of my hair.’ But me, I wanted to love her, to always be near her.”

Crazy Genie, told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice—first as a child and later as hopeful, emotionally wounded young woman—is the second novel by the French author Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation, color and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1977. Her first novel, Free Day, won the Prix Roger Nimier in 1973. Together these books cement Cagnati’s astonishing power as a writer to convey the experience of people literature has overlooked, awakening compassion and giving a voice to the voiceless.