Unique ... 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.
A Hymn to Life is not, finally, a book about collapse. Nor is it a story of triumphant overcoming. It is something more complex and necessary: a work about memory, identity, fracture and the quiet violence we enact when we demand that survivors perform their pain in ways that make the rest of us comfortable ... What A Hymn to Life ultimately offers is a refusal of that reduction. Gisèle does not ask to be exemplary. She asks to be allowed complexity. To hold joy and devastation at once; to love again if she chooses; to remember without being consumed. To insist that Pelicot’s crimes do not erase the life she built in spite of him.
