In Bucharest in 1958, Elena's parents tell her not to have any more to do with Jacob - if she marries him, he'll only drag her off to Israel and she won't be happy there because she isn't Jewish. In New Jersey in 1990, Elena (now Helen) and Jacob tell their son Alexandru not to marry Marie - she'll only want to drag him off to France, and he won't be happy there...

Through several generations of a Romanian-American family, Cusset looks with a mixture of irony and agony at some of the complex ways relations between generations can fail to work - not just the alarming tendency of parents to repeat, with the best possible intentions, the exact same mistakes that their own parents made in trying to ensure that their children get the brilliant future they obviously deserve, but also the astonishing way we can manage to give offence to our in-laws and start epic feuds without even noticing it.

It's tempting to imagine that Cusset set out on this exercise as a way of releasing her feelings about her real-life mother-in-law, but then got so interested in the character of Elena that she let her take over and become the sympathetic focus of the book, in which the French daughter-in-law ends up a rather peripheral and not always very endearing figure. Elena is the fighter whose determination gets her family out of Romania and via Israel to the US; she's the dreamy reader of Tolstoy and Victor Hugo who carves out a career in nuclear physics (how many works of literary fiction can you think of where a female scientist is the central character?) and then reinvents herself as a software engineer; she's the little girl who never discovers for sure whether her adoptive parents are also her biological parents; and she's also the mother-in-law who can never bring herself to believe that her son's wife is treating him right...

A fascinating and very readable novel - for once, I think the mixing-up of the timeline, juxtaposing parallel incidents from different generations, is not just a gimmick or a way of delaying a big reveal, but does actually add something to the book. I think I'll be looking out for some more of Cusset's work. ( )

Ce que je retiens de ce livre, c'est cette vision du temps qui passe, les conflits générationnels. Des corps qui se dégradent, des espoirs qu'un mère place dans son enfant avant de comprendre qu'il ne lui appartient pas malgré l'éducation différente qu'elle a reçu. De la maladie qui plane, et de l'importance de la famille surtout, celle que l'on s'invente mais aussi celle qui nous adopte !
->http://ouistilit.blogspot.fr/2013/04/un-brillant-avenir-de-catherine-cusset.html ( )

Confrontation culturelle, religieuse et générationnelle entre Est et Ouest, après guerre et 80's ... ( )

Ma réaction dès le début de ce livre a été double : autant j'ai été accrochée par l'histoire, autant j'ai regretté le style, que je trouve un peu trop familier, quotidien et sans personnalité. La même histoire écrite d'une façon belle et poétique aurait pu donner un chef d'œuvre. Mais précisons tout de suite que l'intrigue est bien bâtie, les personnages fouillés, la problématique intéressante et le point de vue convaincant. Tout à fait recommandable. ( )

Roman intéressant et foisonnant, mais pourquoi l'auteur s'est-elle acharnée à changer d'époque et de lieu pratiquement à chaque chapitre ? c'est lassant et à mon avis inutile pour l'intérêt de l'histoire. ( )