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    Breathe: A Novel
    Breathe: A Novel
    Breathe: A Novel
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Breathe: A Novel

    By Anne-Sophie Brasme

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

    Anne-Sophie Brasme's Breathe is the haunting confession of nineteen-year-old Charlene Boher.

    From her prison cell, Charlene recounts her lonely adolescence. Growing up shy and unpopular, Charlene never had many friends. That is, until she meet Sarah, a beautiful and charismatic American-French girl who moved back to Paris for high school. Much to Charlene's shock and delight, the two girls quickly develop an intense friendship. With Sarah by her side, Charlene finally begins to feel accepted and even loved.

    However, after a brief idyllic period, the girls' relationship becomes rocky and friendship veers towards obsession. As Sarah drops Charlene for older, more glamorous friends, Charlene's devotion spirals into hatred. Unfolding slowly and eerily towards a shocking conclusion, Anne-Sophie Brasme's Breathe is an intense, convincing portrait of a possessive and ambiguous friendship.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 3, 2013
    ISBN9781466859487
    Author

    Anne-Sophie Brasme

    Anne-Sophie Brasme was born in 1984. She lives in Paris and Breathe is her first novel.

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    Reviews for Breathe

    3/5

    50 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book I read in the past when I was 13. This book is about obsession and domain. First, a girl is an executioner and the other girl is a victim. Second, then the story changed when the papers were exchanged.
    • 2/5
      1.75

      Ugh.
    • 2/5
      Meh. You can tell this was written by a teenager, to be honest.
    • 4/5
      Wow! The characters are compelling, and I was blown away by the poignancy Brasme portrayed Charlene with. This is one of those books where you sympathize with the villain. You really do.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Torture! one complaint and self absorbing line after another. Awful. I couldn’t finish it. I can’t imagine anything but n uneasy horror show being made from this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      amazing

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Breathe - Anne-Sophie Brasme

    Forgetting

    I’d forgotten. The joy, the shamelessness, the indolence, the smells, the silences and the dizziness, the images, the colours and the sounds, their faces, the tone of their voices, their absence and their smiles, the laughter and the tears, the happiness and the impertinence, the disdain and the need for love, the taste of the first years of my life. But the past suddenly resurfaces in the depth of this darkness-soaked cell, in the chill of solitude. It confesses, at length, painfully. To counter, perhaps, the emptiness of the present. Like botched photos with blurred movements, images shatter in my memory. The truth is that I had forgotten nothing, but until now had not deigned to remember. My life might have been normal. If I’d chosen, I might’ve been able to live like any of you. But perhaps it wasn’t really my fault: at a certain moment someone got the better of me and I was no longer master of my actions. Perhaps. I don’t know.

    My existence appeared flat and insignificant. I lived in a world that did not see me, that I didn’t understand. I existed because I had been made to exist. That’s how it was. I should be glad to be alive, simply to be there. I was, after all, a child like any other. I lived without wondering why, I took what was given me, I asked for nothing. Yet what happened to me was inevitable. It’s a well-known fact that the craziest people are those who at first sight look entirely normal. Obsession is smart: it targets those anonymous faces who look as though they haven’t the slightest worry. That’s what happened to me. Nothing today links me to the carefree, spirited child I was. Today, I have two identities and recognise neither.

    One day someone asked me, was I sorry? I didn’t reply. Maybe I was ashamed, not of what I’d done, but of what I’d felt. Surely I should have felt inhuman. I was inhuman, there’s no denying it. But less for committing a crime than for not feeling regret.

    *   *   *

    My name is Charlene Boher and I’m nineteen years old. I’ve been stuck here nearly two years now, watching the same day go by. I was barely out of childhood when I committed the irreparable. On the night of 7 September, two years ago, I killed. I admit it. Besides, I’ve told the police everything. I was, as some would have it, ‘totally lacking in maturity for a girl of sixteen’. But I didn’t act on some wild impulse. I knew exactly what I was doing, I’d planned every detail, I was aware of the consequences. People might well despise me, they may look at me with hatred in their eyes, but I regret nothing, do you hear, not a single aspect of the events that destroyed my life. Sinking into madness is not necessarily fate, it can be a choice.

    No doubt I chose not to have to look at the mistakes of the past. I fled out of cowardice, propelled by my refusal to answer the whys and the wherefores of my life, by hatred of myself. I was afraid. I feared pain, I feared truth, I feared remorse. I was afraid of having been blind and suddenly having to open my eyes. In short, I feared regret.

    So I decided to write.

    To transcribe my life, my almost banal past. My story began in the most deceptive innocence. I make myself piece together my memories because I realise they reveal signs of an obsession that would become incurable. I make myself remember because I need to talk.

    Modesty, violence, anger make me want to talk. Pain, too. You write like you kill. It comes from the belly and all of a sudden it’s in your throat. It’s a cry of despair.

    *   *   *

    The first thing I remember is the scent of a blouse. I think it must have been made of silk, or at least some very fluid material, that fell down over a generous breast. It was a flowery fragrance, magnolia perhaps, sensual, with a hint of spice, like the smell of the powder women put on their faces.

    The aroma came from a neck. A neck with a pearl necklace that my fingers twiddled. The neck was a little wrinkled. It belonged to a strong woman, a woman with damp skin. The woman spoke. I fell asleep in her silky arms, breathing in her scent. Maman. A thousand memories gallop in my head.

    I sense the summer. I recall escapades in the cool, damp grass, four-year-old legs carrying me as fast as they can across a vast garden. I remember the smell of hay and sneezing in the dust, the rugged caress of trees, the scratches on their bark. The tender touch of the mud and the sludge mixed with the cold, pleasing water as I crossed the little stream in front of my grandparents’ house, trousers pulled up over grazed knees. The syrupy taste of the first fruits of the year that we stole from a corner of the old orchard, dribbling over our tongues and sugarsticky hands. The summer has the taste of brown earth, damp grass, sand, of burning salt.

    Far from the summer there was Paris. An apartment under the roof, high walls, gigantic doors. A tangle of corridors that led to immense bedrooms where a subtle calm reigned. All was white – the tiles, the walls, the space.

    I remember the silences, different according to the time of day or night, long solitudes around me in a world too vast for a child: there was the silence of the morning, the first sounds of the cars on the boulevard, the fatigue, the diffuse half-light before the shutters were opened, the tick-tock of the clock in the kitchen, the crumpling of the pages of my father’s newspaper, the strange dizziness that took hold of me, like a fear, the moment he had to leave and I was left alone with the nanny. Then there was the solitude of the afternoon, the distant, muffled racket of the city streets, the hours when the apartment was empty. And there was the silence of the night, when, alone in my room, I was the last to sleep and I listened to the darkness murmuring in my

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