Advance Praise
“Early childhood in 1950s Paris. L’Amérique is a vivid narrative seen through the eyes of a growing boy. Filled with fascinating characters, a fantastic sense of time and place, and shot through with threads of rich humor. At the close, our young narrator is in America, awaiting an unsure future in the land of hope. The reader waits eagerly for what happens next.”
— Jane Feather, New York Times bestselling author of The Blackwater Brides series.
“An immigrant story told from a child’s viewpoint, Jeanot’s escapades in the land of miracles are wonderful and wonderfully rendered. Sometimes naïve, other times wise in the ways of the very young, L’Amérique is rich in surprises and delights. It’s a book worth lingering over.”
— David Robbins, New York Times bestselling author of War of the Rats; The Low Bird
“Jeanot, a young French boy, comes of age in L’Amérique. His world is peopled with quirky characters, his kind Papa, always trying to placate mercurial Maman, his wise Great Aunt Tatie, and his all-too-knowledgeable best friend Babette. The family moves to America, where “anything can happen” and often does in this bittersweet tale of growing up in two countries, the old world and the new. Thierry Sagnier offers up a rich blend of humor and pathos in L’Amérique, a story of cultural clashes and the common values of love and kindness that unite us all.”
— Ellen Herbert, author of The Last Government Girl, winner of the Maryland Writers’ Association Best Novel Award
“L’Amérique is one of those rare gems of literary fiction in which it is difficult to tell whether the character or the plot is in the driver’s seat. As an avid reader, I was at times, enchanted; as a would be writer, I was admiring and envious; as an adult, humbled; and as a parent, amused, and often ashamed.
Thirty-five years as a Family Therapist and Relationship expert have taught me the impossibility of viewing one’s childhood with any degree of accuracy. I was mesmerized by Sagnier’s ability to serve so faithfully as young Jeanot’s scribe. Anybody interested in childhood development should read this novel.”
— Marilyn Finch Williams, LCSW Psychotherapist, Founder of the MEDIAN Center for Resilience and Brain Training
L’Amérique
A Novel
Thierry Sagnier
L’Amérique
A Novel
Thierry Sagnier
Copyright © 2018 by Thierry Sagnier
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Edition
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-174-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62720-175-9
Design: Julia Cardali
Marketing: Meg Kennedy
Development: Rachel Kingsley
Printed in the United States of America
Published by Apprentice House
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.ApprenticeHouse.com
Pour Papa et Maman, Isa et Flo, Louise et Tatie. Merci à tous !
Chapter 1
In Jeanot’s room off the main corridor were two bunk beds. Jeanot slept in the top one and when either of his sisters visited, she could have the bottom bunk. There was one chair, a floor lamp with a faulty bulb, and a false fireplace which Jeanot knew was the lair of unspeakable beings who no longer scared him. The focus of the room, though, was a large square table on which he kept his display of lead cowboys and Choctaw, Navajo, Kiowa and Apache warriors. He’d been told the Indians were from these specific tribes by the man in the toy store who’d sold him the small figures. In truth, Jeanot wasn’t sure the man knew his American Indians at all.
Jeanot’s Papa built the table from boards he found in the building’s cellar. The boy watched as his father sawed the ancient greying wood to the proper size, then used a hand-drill to make screw holes. Papa told Jeanot to put soap on the screw threads. “Like this,” Papa said, and he moistened the screw threads with his mouth, then rubbed them against a bar of brown soap. He sank the tip of the fastener into the drilled hole and handed Jeanot a screwdriver, placed the blade in the screw’s groove, and said, “Now turn it to the right.” Jeanot did and got the screw about a third of the way in. “It won’t turn anymore,” he said, and Papa took over.
It took two hours to build the table. When it was done, it didn’t wobble at all but stood as rock steady as any piece of furniture in the house, steadier, even, than the family dining room table that did wobble, and that Papa simply couldn’t cure, though he’d tried.
That same afternoon, Jeanot’s Maman knotted and dyed an old tablecloth a sand color in the kitchen sink. She balled several wads of paper, wetted them and sprinkled them with white flour from the kitchen. She put them in the small oven and lit it, and twenty minutes later, when the balls dried hard, she glued them to the table, draped the tablecloth over everything, and then tacked it into place. The tabletop became a North American desert of varied sand-colored hues with mounds made by the lumps of papier maché.
Maman painted the adjoining wall blue, with white clouds and a fierce yellow sun that baked the tablecloth desert. She put birds in the sky, vultures and eagles and a giant Andean condor she and Jeanot had read about in Paris Match. Below the sky she painted a verdant plain with buffaloes, gazelles and cows, because, she explained, she had always liked painting cows. Cows, said Maman, were so many fun colors: black, and brown, and white, all at the same time. She painted more cows than gazelles, but Jeanot didn’t mind.
Together, Jeanot and his mother made teepees from fabric remnants and dowels.
“Like this,” she showed him, gathering and tying the sticks together at one end. She made a cone, cut a small swatch of fabric and used clear brown glue to stick the fabric to the dowels. Then using a very small brush and oil paints, she decorated the teepees with images of stars, moons, horses, bears and antelopes. And cows.
For a long time the diorama was the focus of Jeanot’s world. Every holiday brought new braves and cowhands, some wielding lariats and pistols. The building’s Russian concierge, Sergei Kharkov, gave Jeanot a Cossack on a steed. The tiny figure wore a fur hat and brandished a
