Reading group “La cache” by Christophe Boltanski

On 4 November, we will discuss Christian Boltanski’s La cache, winner of the 2015 Prix Femina. The book was later adapted by Lionel Baier, and the film will be screened at the French Institute on 8 November to mark the opening of the French Film Festival.

About the book :

La Cache is a memoir of an exceptional family, among its members Christian Boltanski–one of France’s most important contemporary artists– and Luc Boltanski, director of research at the prestigious EHESS and the inventor of “pragmatic sociology.” Christophe, however, focuses his narratives on Luc and Christian’s parents, Etienne and Myriam Boltanski, and their unconventional lives as family heads, intellectuals, and leftists in a mansion on the luxurious rue de Grenelle. Christophe is Luc’s son, yet he spends his days at his grandparents’ before moving in with his immediate family on his fourteenth birthday.

“Their house was a palace, but they lived like tramps,” Christophe writes. “It would be a mistake to understand this mix of wandering, scarcity, dirt, and greed as the fads of some quirky grand bourgeois. Their weird behaviors were a rejection of good manners and social conventions all together. As a sign of rebellion against their bourgeois origins, their conducts created an inanity; an isolation from the world, and in this sense, they carry something pathological. The usual hierarchies were destroyed. Luxury was systematically bordering on paucity.”

The Boltanski family lives as a tightly bound unit, sharing everything from meals to vacations crammed into a Fiat 500. This unusual closeness stems from the difficult histories of the parents: Etienne, a Jewish doctor barred from practicing under Vichy anti-Semitic laws, and Myriam, a polio-stricken woman adopted into wealth who became the emotional center of the household. Etienne once hid for twenty months in a hole inside their apartment, an event that shaped the family’s dynamics of fear, dependence, and resistance to separation. Christophe Boltanski’s book portrays this mix of love, trauma, and eccentricity with humor and tenderness.