Claire Guezengar's Ouestern: A Family Feud Over a Beach House

Claire Guezengar's novel 'Ouestern,' published by Éditions Léo Scheer, recounts a family dispute over a seaside house in Ker**, a small town in western France. In the early 1980s, the family spends holidays in a simple dune house with a veranda and stairs to the beach. After the grandmother's death, the eldest child, an authoritarian fifty-something, inherits the house and buys out her siblings for 50,000 francs, the price of an Audi 100. The narrator, a niece, cannot bear losing the property she cherished most. The aunt, described as selfish and petty, renovates the house into a Canadian-style chalet, becoming the 'enculée' who single-handedly spoils family memory. The conflict escalates when the aunt's eldest daughter buys a neighboring house that the narrator's mother desperately wanted. The narrator engages in acts of sabotage and settles scores with her aunt and cousin years later. Instead of pathos, the reckoning becomes a jubilant, humorous exercise featuring two operetta cowboys from 'The Wild Wild West' who try to enter the story but never succeed. The book turns a beach house into a stage for a duel against the waves.