The Secret Child

Jean-Michel Olivier’s novel, L’Enfant secret, winner of the Swiss Dentan prize, is a profound exploration of those secrets we all inherit as part of our DNA.  It is a foray into the hidden deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors about which we know little but sometimes discover through the inadvertent confession of a distant cousin or a box of photos.They are not simply words on a page but images, a poem set to a particular music that needed to be transposed in order to communicate the resonance of Jean-Michel Olivier’s voice.  The author and translator have collaborated in producing a linguistic symbiosis.Rare moments of clarity are what Olivier pieces together into a whole—his whole, and ours as well.