Title of Book: NO AND ME
Author’s Name: Delphine de Vigan, Bloomsbury Publishing
Publisher: London 2010
Rating: I rate this book four out of five stars ****
For weeks on end, I kept looking at this book’s cover–a darkling blue night sky peppered with shimmering stars. And starkly poised beneath this canopy, a house in pitch black nightshade—with a small rectangular window and a light shining. A round “O” of the word NO has two figures seated on a couch—actually talking. And to complete the cover, there is a blood-red door at the left bottom of the house’s main portal for entry. What stands out is the title “No and Me”: Two girls, three friends. One family falling apart is the entrée to this novel’s feast.
Ironically though, No and Me’s narrative is more about things falling apart—than any other expectation—I thought I could cherish. So, remembering how to apply the niceties of “reviewing a novel”—I applied the desirables of the plot—events of the story and the sequence in which they are told. Then characters: the “actors”—how they are depicted and developed.
Then the setting—the time and place where our story occurs. And finally, theme: what is author de Vigan saying. What is her purpose? Is her style commensurate with the way she tells the story?
Why all this rigorous care and caution? You see, friend, I was in the territory of realistic fiction, and one has to be very careful on such hallowed terrain. But author de Vigan is a dab hand in this novel. It’s a category—or some say—it's YA (Young Adult) fiction. You don’t trespass here unless you are surefooted, rather than footloose!
What’s No and Me all about? To summarise, it’s a very touchy and beautiful story—all about home—how someone who lives in a house with their family can be as homeless as one who lives on the streets. It’s the story of Lou—who decides to do a school project on the homeless and chooses a girl she has seen at the railway station—and to make her the subject of her interviews. No—the interviewee is 18. She has been living on the streets for a long time.
Lou and No begin to meet regularly and soon a bond develops between them. When her project is completed, Lou begs her parents to take No into the house. They agree and the house becomes a haven for No—and the family itself begins to heal. You see, Lou’s mother has not gone out of the house in years, and her father has been weeping nightly in the dark for all of those years.
No and me–book cover courtesy Mohammed Book Stores Ltd.
It’s a story that makes you choke on its beauty; There is Lou’s generosity of giving No money to eat, buy alcohol and cigarettes and then, the warmth and shelter of a home in a real house. Yet, the big question is posed: who is the homeless—No or Lou—or both?
It's tempting to say that Lou is happier with No in the home—at least for the time being. But things begin to fall apart, and the centre cannot hold. No begins to drink, keep long hours and then Lou’s father decides that No has to go. No disappears, and Lou goes searching for her. Lou does not find her; she never hears from her. Lou gets an enviable “A” mark for her project.
I was trying not to shed a tear for posterity—but the tears came. It’s a story of such quiet beauty with Lou describing herself: “I was a little thing that didn’t look like anything.”
No and Me is surely the kind of book everyone must read. It is memorable, stabs your composure and leaves you helplessly wondering of the wretched of the world who are making it out in the cold.
No and Me is all about love, school, growing up, family issues, homelessness, abandonment, bleakness—the night of the soul. This YA novel of realistic fiction shows Lou’s courage and resourcefulness. In Trinidad, we have plenty of monologue fodder when it comes down to abject poverty and homelessness. I fear politics has inured those appointed to look at our homeless—to miss the boat. I recommend housing and social welfare head honchos to get a copy of No and Me; immediately if not before. The setting for this story is Paris, France, with cell phones and trains—a La Grande Vitesse—and homelessness abandonment and desperation.
No and Me was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize—The Booksellers’ Prize, the Prix du Rotary International and the Prix Solidarité.