Extraordinary ... 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.
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.
It was probably necessary that Gisèle Pelicot should have had a ghost-writer but you wonder what she would have revealed left to herself ... In her dignity as well as her anger, she is more of a role model than she knows.
Extraordinarily courageous ... 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.
Nuanced, richly layered ... A Hymn to Life is her attempt to resist canonisation: to tell readers how radically the trial altered her life, how in many ways it diminished it, how the crack does not always let the light in.
Her memoir, written with the journalist Judith Perrignon and translated into sharp, plainspoken English by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, is itself a work of sophisticated integration ... But even those of us prepared to give long lists of warnings to young women heading to parties know that we can’t reasonably tell a newlywed bride never to let the groom mix her drinks. The regime of personal safety warnings meets its end, or at least a logical impasse. For this reason, if no other, perhaps more people than ever will agree with Gisèle Pelicot that it’s now 'up to society as a whole to address these issues, and to change.'
[A] searing, unforgettable, and strangely beautiful memoir ... 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. A harrowing read, it is also an unexpected testimony to the tricky nature of attachment.
...a book that’s extraordinary both for the story it tells and the acuity with which it’s told. Elegantly translated from French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, A Hymn to Life is far from a victim narrative or a misery memoir. Nor is it a simple tale – for Pelicot is willing to confront the complexity of her feelings for the man who betrayed her ... this is a powerful tale of a mighty woman.
