Mauro quits his job at La Comète at the start of the summer, but goes back to work there occasionally, sometimes replacing the chef when he’s away. In the months that follow, he uses his free time and his freedom of movement to rack up experience: he works briefly as an adviser for a new kind of café chain offering hot and cold meals, and moonlights at ten euros per hour for a friend when she’s preparing to cook for a table of ten in a private restaurant in the Marais for a month, as a way of getting better known. He has something on his mind, I can tell. I ask him about it one summer night as we’re walking down Rue des Envierges toward the Parc de Belleville. I’d like to open another restaurant. I stop dead on the sidewalk. Along the same lines as La Belle Saison? I ask. He shakes his head. Not really. The idea is to create a place that will give back importance to what’s happening in the dining room. A restaurant that will reinvent the notion of the commensal—togetherness around a table. The concept is that the meal will not only express the glorious creativity of one person, will not only provide an individual sensory experience, but will be about relationships, a possible collective adventure. Like, you want to eat a roast suckling pig, but it’s a meal for four or five people, so you stand up and you ask if anyone would like to share a suckling pig with you. Then you go over to the other person’s table, you talk with him, and that’s how it starts. You see? I see. I smile and pretend to hand him my plate.

Also by Maylis de Kerangal

ALSO BY MAYLIS DE KERANGAL

The Heart

A Note About the Author and Translator

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels: Je marche sous un ciel de traîne (2000), La vie voyageuse (2003), Corniche Kennedy (2008), and Naissance d’un pont (winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and the Prix Médicis in 2010; published in English as Birth of a Bridge). In 2014, her fifth novel, Réparer les vivants (published in the United States in 2016 as The Heart), received wide acclaim and won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama. She lives in Paris. You can sign up for email updates here.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Sam Taylor is the author of three novels and has translated more than thirty books from the French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. His translation of Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart won the French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize and the Lewis Galantière Award. You can sign up for email updates here.