Cursed Bread
It is 1951 and, in the small French town of Pont-saint-esprit, summer is approaching. Pont-saint-esprit has a bakery where the baker’s wife, Elodie, stands behind the counter feeling “so very bored”; a bar where the townsmen meet night after night to enjoy the “local hospitality”; a lavoir where the townswomen gather each Tuesday to gossip as they wrestle the filth from clothes; a series of newly restored streets where a parade of stray dogs and “sinister children” roam; and a lake where the newest arrival to town, “the ambassador”, strips off and swims bare-skinned.
The war is over. Everyone is living in “this new time of peace and plenty”. This, we discover, is a lie. Peace is unattainable. People are driven “by hunger, by instinct”.
As the days lengthen, the townspeople arrive at the bakery seeking cool absolution from Elodie: “The frequency of my neighbours’ confessions ticked up through the summer, as if the heat brought out something in them, made them long to lose their secrets like too-heavy clothes.”
We learn about the town – its people and ghosts, its secrets and superstitions – from a remove. Elodie no longer resides in PontSaint-esprit; she now lives alone in a room in a coastal town. Policemen visit her, arriving in pairs, to ask questions about the events that ignited during the hot sweep of summer. They always leave disappointed, no closer to solving the cause for the crimes and hysteria that enveloped the town. “I won’t talk because the only real truth I could tell them is that sometimes there is a switch, and the world is turned upside down.”
Cursed Bread is the third novel by Welsh writer Sophie Mackintosh. Each of her novels is primed with a switch, ready to be flicked. In her first novel, The Water Cure, three sisters are raised on an island away from the corrupting forces of men. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, it explores a world in which “bodies must be controlled in order to be safe”. This theme of control carries over to her second novel, Blue Ticket, in which the fate of girls is decided by a lottery: “A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom.”
The driving forces of Cursed Bread are more diffuse. With the narrative conceit less rigidly scaffolded around the novel, we can see Mackintosh take a leap forward in her skills as a storyteller. Her exploration of corporeal control is threaded into the backdrop of postwar France. The narrative tension arises from a series of trip-wires – delicious, dangerous, terrible traps – set to ensnare characters and readers alike.
Part of this trickery and play comes from the rhymes that splinter and skip through the novel’s sentences: “If you eat the bread, you’ll die, he said. The statement made no sense, but it filled me with an electric dread.” A cadence emerges – imperfect and quickening, carrying the qualities of an irregular heartbeat. And we, the readers, are tumbling towards inevitable doom.
The townspeople are striving to return to normal. But “underneath all the wine and dancing and forgetting” lurks a kind of erotic paranoia. The town is on heat. Over tables and behind counters, in kitchens and bathrooms and dark alleyways, characters consume one another.
In Mackintosh’s hands, desire is never one-dimensional. It runs thickly through veins, pulsating with possibilities of danger and pain, edging towards messy emotional and physical release. Not everyone arrives at a point of satisfaction. But for those who do, the outcomes of fulfilled desires don’t stop with spasms of pleasure: they continue to flex and contract through the narrative. Little deaths accrue.
We learn all about this from Elodie.
But how much can we trust what she says is true? “As I remember it, my skin turned to dough under his hands – rising, yielding … but when I want to I can imagine it differently, the audacity of memory can be staggering, the liberties I can take and the things I can give myself.”
Time and memory are corrupted again and again. Elodie’s recounting of the events occurs in flashes – alternating between highly saturated scenes and muddied, intrusive remembrances. Dialogue is unadorned with quotation marks. And, depending on the state Elodie is in, conversations may or may not be clearly attributed.
The reader becomes a detective, sniffing through the short vignettes, trying to align a time line of events, testing the validity and valences of truth. The horrors intensify. The reader must shrug off any attempt to remain aloof and coolly suspicious. Otherwise, like the policemen who visit Elodie, they will leave disappointed. Mackintosh spins a fever dream: illusive, sensual, catastrophic. It is all the more pleasurable, being tricked and led astray.
In a brief author’s note – only three lines long – Mackintosh anchors the novel in an entirely new location within the reader’s mind. The town is real. The truth of its “catastrophe” has been theorised at length, but remains unproved. The world is turned upside down again.
Garnering fans such as Deborah Levy and Daisy Johnson, each new Mackintosh novel feels like an event – brilliant and bruising. Her sentences have always crackled with wit and violence. But with Cursed Bread, her storytelling has reached new heights.
Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, $32.99