The Godmother
Patience Portefeux is a 53-year-old widow with two grown daughters and a mother in a nursing home. She works as an Arabic translator for the French police, preferring to translate phone taps rather than the interrogations so she can work from home. Even though she’s working on the drug squad, she feels sympathetic for the young men she’s listening to. The inciting incident of the plot? She accidentally stumbles across the mom of one of the drug dealers she’s listening in on, and inserts herself into the drama. Eventually, she turns into a drug dealer; Patience knows what she has to do to evade the police.
The novel is short (only 185 pages in its English translation) and the plot moves quickly. As the description reads (this is what hooked me): “This is not the French idyll of postcards and stock photos. With a gallery of traffickers, dealers, police officers, and politicians, The Godmother casts its sharp and amusing gaze on everyday survival in contemporary France.” It’s a look at the immigrant populations of France, particularly young Muslim men from Northern Africa, and how futile a “war on drugs” is (in France, but the lessons can easily be transposed to the U.S.).
You learn about Patience’s parents and her background — her mother, a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, and her father, from French Tunisia. The book actually opens with them: “My parents were crooks, with a visceral love of money. For them it wasn’t an inert substance stashed away in a suitcase or held in some account. No. They loved it as a living, intelligent being that can create and destroy, that possesses the gift of reproduction… It is the answer to every question. it is the pre-Babel language that unites mankind.”
This guides Patience, later, when she ends up involved as a drug dealer. I won’t spoil much more – but it’s a compelling (and quick!) read. Plus, it’s being made into a movie called Mama Weed with Isabelle Huppert!
Rating: ★★★★★
