The Secret Child - Olivier Jean-Michel

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.

The Secret Child narrator attributes his becoming an artist to life experiences inherited from his grandparents.  Set in Trieste during its transition from Austrian to Italian rule after WWI, the narrative includes cameo appearances by James and Nora Joyce, Ezra Pound and Vladimir Nabokov.  But the central episodes of this memoir-novella concern Olivier’s maternal grandfather, né Anton Buchacher, who transforms himself into Antonio Campofaggi, and whose artful photographic images help metamorphose Benito Mussolini into Il Duce.  Oliver’s own impressionistic “images” are a self-conscious anagram/metaphor for “magic,” which equally epitomizes the translator’s feat of legerdemain in rendering the author’s lyrical style in English—a challenge Laurence Moscato meets with remarkable success