"LE MALHEUR DU BAS" Inès Bayard

Useful informations:
- a novel (in my opinion) of morality, set in contemporary times
- Narrative 3-seater, strongly focused on the main character and rarely going out, her world '
- The action of the novel is happening mainly in Paris

Outline of content:
The novel begins, from the end: on the first three pages, we learn that the mother poisoned her husband and son at dinner.

Time goes back and we meet a young woman- Marie, who seemingly has everything: a great job in a bank, a lawyer's husband, beautiful apartment, friends, etc. The idyll ends when one day after work, the boss proposes to drive her home. The man descends from the route, parks in the garage and violently violates the subordinate (I recommend reading the most sensitive readers on an empty stomach). Marie, shocked, does not tell anyone about the whole incident, the closest ones do not see any changes in her behavior, and if they see, they put it to work fatigue. Marie tries to recover and forget about the tragedy, but she does not know for long that she is pregnant. Intuitively, she feels that this is the child of the boss, and here begins the broadly understood "hatred": to herself, to her husband, to the child, to the world and everything that surrounds her. Without psychological help after the trauma that touched her, Marie falls into deeper and deeper depression: she neglects her duties, does not look after her son properly, does not go to work and is most likely not getting out of bed. To all this, my husband begins to cheat on her, and she feels more and more chaos in her life. In the end, an idea appears in her head, which the reader already knows from the first pages of the novel. The ending brings with it a certain spike twist (SPOILER ALERT): Marie's husband has asked a friend to test the child's DNA. When he falls dead, poisoned by his wife, he gets an SMS saying that this is his child.

My opinion:
The novel touches on an extremely important and painful problem that many women have already touched. The reader is a witness of what the lack of help and support for those closest to in such traumatic events leads to. The author shows very well the progressive depression and what the main character feels. Nevertheless, at certain moments the book is long and it is not that interesting. However, due to the fact that it raises an important topic and ends up in me really remarkable, I can say that I even liked it