Yet Slimani has distributed neurosis generously among her characters: Myriam and Paul, too, seem acutely on edge.
Her attentiveness goes hand in hand with her obsessive tendencies her willingness to give her all to the family masks her desperation to escape a difficult past. Louise’s bond with the children-and with their parents-has a dark underbelly, of course. Mila, Slimani writes, “watches herself in the mirror when she cries.” After running too far ahead of Louise, “she makes it up to the nanny, clinging to her legs.” They are well aware that their needs shape the lives of the adults around them, and they wield this power deliberately. To know that each morning Adam “welcomes with gurgles, his plump arms reaching out,” or that Mila is the kind of child who “doesn’t stop until she comes to the very end of the sidewalk,” is to know too much about these siblings whose awful fate is already sealed.Įxcept this, too, is part of Slimani’s project: The children who are dead at the beginning of the book are shown throughout not as idealized innocents, but as complex beings who navigate adult whims, and the line between danger and safety, with a clarity that eludes their elders. Her descriptions of Mila and Adam’s interactions with Louise are finely attuned and-given what’s coming-haunting in their intimacy.
She’s interested in the circumstances that lead parents to seek them-and in the ways that children respond to being cast as actors in adult fantasies. Slimani, for her part, doesn’t seem to believe in miracles. She appears imperturbable.” She is, they soon decide, “a miracle-worker.” The parents are “charmed” by Louise’s “smooth features, her open smile, her lips that do not tremble. Like love at first sight.” The children adore her. When they meet Louise, the choice is “instantly obvious. As important, they’re hoping for the chance to prove something themselves: to show “that they are good people serious, orderly people who try to give their children the best of everything.” The choice of a nanny, Slimani shows, has as much to do with how adults see themselves, with how they would like to be seen by others, as it does with a family’s practical needs. Myriam and Paul, wary of entrusting their children to a stranger for the first time, want their prospective caregivers to prove that they are responsible. The 50 Best Podcasts of 2021 Laura Jane Standley and Eric McQuade When she gets an opportunity to go back to work, they agree to look for a nanny. The arrangement has suited the couple for a while-having a second child “was an excuse not to leave the sweetness of home”-but spending her days with two young children has made Myriam “gloomy,” and jealous of Paul’s career. Her husband, Paul, works in music production. Myriam, “the most dedicated student” in her law school class, has stayed home since the birth of her children, Mila and Adam. (Slimani’s first novel, forthcoming in English as In the Garden of the Ogre, was inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair.) Immediately following Slimani’s brief, grisly mise en scène, the book goes back in time. Set in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, it is, in many ways, a novel of manners, a deft portrait of bourgeois family life in the 21st century. If the premise of The Perfect Nanny is its violent denouement, its subject is far more ordinary. The question at the heart of the book is neither who nor how but why.
DAD FROM THE NANNY DEAD HOW TO
She only knew how to give death.” This is no mystery novel. With the same level of professionalism without emotion. The paramedics “had to save the other one too, of course. “It took only a few seconds.” His sister, still alive when the ambulance arrives, has had her lungs punctured, “her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers.” Louise-the nanny, the killer-is not yet named, but her presence is noted. Slimani’s Goncourt Prize–winning 2016 novel, Chanson Douce-published this month in English as The Perfect Nanny-lands its biggest punch on the first page. She knew she wanted to write about a nanny now she had her opening. To the French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, who had a toddler of her own, the tragedy was the perfect creative catalyst. (She survived, and has pleaded not guilty to killing the children.) To most parents, the headlines were a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of children and the cruelty of which their adult caregivers are capable.
As the children bled in the bathtub, reports said, the nanny-who was so close with her well-to-do employers that they had earlier that year spent several days visiting her relatives in the Dominican Republic-slashed her own throat. Paris Match deemed the perpetrator of this “inexplicable” act “ la nounou de l’horreur”-the nanny of horror. In late 2012, news broke around the world that a nanny on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was accused of fatally stabbing two young children in her care.
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