“It may be tempting to skip Gisèle Pelicot’s account of the case that collapsed her ‘simple, little life’ and protect yourself from the horrors she endured. Don’t succumb to that impulse. Pelicot presents her story like a well-organized crime novel, detailing the twin tragedies of her life—her mother’s death when Pelicot was 9 and her husband’s 2020 arrest for drugging her and filming dozens of men raping her over the course of 10 years—with a cool focus and unflagging energy . . . Pelicot does not spare the details of the case . . . By attempting to put the unimaginable into measured, precise language, Pelicot reveals a primal need to tell her story as she experienced it, and illustrates a grace in accepting that some contradictions cannot be untangled.” —Julie Kosin, New York Magazine (Book Gossip)
“Gisèle Pelicot’s new memoir, A Hymn to Life, is a reminder of organized narrative’s simple power . . . Replete with details of modest domesticity in modern France, A Hymn to Life is also a rousing feminist manifesto . . . It seeks a proper transfer of shame from sex-crime victims to their perpetrators, and the perpetrators’ enablers.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
“Staggering . . . A lyrical book about monstrous events, a compelling exploration of what it feels like to hold two existences in your brain at once . . . There is only whatever you do to put one foot in front of the other. There is only what it takes to survive.” —Monica Hesse, The Washington Post
“A Hymn to Life is an astonishing book—unflinchingly honest, open to self-interrogation, evocative, determined . . . Pelicot’s honesty is breathtaking, and it helps make A Hymn to Life all the more revelatory as a sociological document.” —Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“A work of sophisticated integration: Pelicot shifts between the ongoing investigation and her memories of childhood, youth, and married life. The two tracks regularly converge as she pauses to consider a distant memory in light of her new knowledge. Pelicot’s account of the marriage must inevitably be a story about her own misjudgment. She takes possession of this devastating central fact with calm authority, her narrative voice a fitting counterpart to her much-noted composure at the trial. ‘Beyond the pain of the revelations and the shame of my body being turned into a sack,’ she writes, ‘there was also the shame of having understood nothing.’” —Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books
“Deeply vulnerable . . . It’s all told from the vantage point of a woman trying to make sense of her life in the face of devastation, sometimes grasping for signs that only hindsight can uncover . . . Yet for all the monstrousness revealed in Pelicot’s story, her steadfast courage and optimism that she will persevere acts as a buoy, reeling the reader back with her own sense of hope for the future when, many times, her retellings of her abusers’ cruelty turn unbearable.” —USA Today
“Searing, unforgettable, and strangely beautiful . . . A Hymn to Life challenges preconceived notions of ‘appropriate’ responses to both sexual violence and disbelief. It tells the story of how a woman held two opposing truths in her hands—the peaceful existence she led by day and the horrifying violence she was unknowingly subjected to by night—in order to piece her shattered life back together in the face of one of the most heinous sexual-abuse cases in modern history.” —Air Mail
“A heartrending and courageous account of the ultimate betrayal.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Vibrates with necessity . . . A Hymn to Life is novelistic and resounds with grace. The language is precise and vivid; the story reverberates with echoes and patterns. It is an extraordinary achievement to write a book this controlled while confronting complication and contradiction . . . Pelicot recounts a lifetime with all its longing and pain. There is beauty, love, hope. And there is rage, loss and fear of the void beneath her feet . . . Many could be enriched by this alertly human account of 70 years of life. Here is a perspective that is full, candid and instructive.” —Financial Times
“A Hymn to Life is alive with the kind of detail that wouldn’t look out of place in a good novel, but it’s the expression it gives to something glimpsed at during the trial that makes it so singular; namely, the transformation of Gisèle Pelicot from a self-avowedly ordinary woman, “content with my little life”, into a figure of astonishing power.” —The Guardian
“Stirring . . . What could be a dark and depressing chronicle propels forward with the force of Ms Pelicot’s quiet courage and instinct for self-reflection . . . Ultimately, Ms Pelicot offers a cautiously hopeful message about how people can overcome trauma to forge a new life . . . Her ordeal began with questions—yet it ends with unresolved questions, too. Even the most worthwhile stories do not always offer satisfying answers. But they can provide a memorable and commendable heroine.” —Economist
“This book could easily be a catalogue of horrors, and to some degree it is. But what makes it so compelling is that it shows what happens when an atomic bomb of cruelty erupts within a seemingly normal family. The book’s translators, Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, have done an excellent job of capturing Pelicot’s tone of determined control and occasional broken anguish as she attempts to understand how the gentle young man she married became one of the world’s most notorious rapists and abusers, without her even noticing.” —The Times (UK)
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