“Is our childhood important to anyone other than ourselves? This is what I asked myself before writing the first lines of Neighbourhood of Decay. Yet once the first sentence was on the page, the rest followed. I certainly didn’t want to write a book about my whole life all in one go, which is why I chose the time from when I was six to fifteen, from when we arrive on the rue des Maraîchers in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris, an area known as the Quartier Charonne, until we were driven out one June morning, my mother and all of us, her five children, thrown onto the pavement with nowhere else to go. I have tried to be as frank as possible, but it wasn’t always easy, there are things that would be more comfortable left unsaid, others that are too easily romanticised, there is a temptation to make small compromises with memory. I really did everything I could to stick as closely as possible to what actually happened in those nine years.”
N. A.

And that is exactly how Aurousseau wrote this book. This former convict’s raw, no-frills words bring to life the boy in short trousers in working class Paris in the 1950s. It’s all there, the colours, smells, costermongers, impromptu parties to accordion music, funfairs, the bars and their drunks, the hoodlums and the punch-ups. Neighbourhood of Decay is an account of a childhood coloured by the love of a mother courage, by the violence and alcoholism of an incompetent – but forgiven – father, and by a progressive descent into delinquency. You feel sad when you finish the book, you wish it could last longer. You have laughed (the sequence about the stick up in the bookshop on the place de la Réunion is worthy of future anthologies), you have cried, but most of all you have become attached. And you won’t forget them in a hurry: big Serge, fat Josée, thebest friend Jo, Jacky from Bordeaux, Marco, Schtoro, Jojo Lezard and all the rest…

Nan Aurousseau has written four novels, all published by Stock, Bleu de chauffe, Du même auteur, Le Ciel sur la tête and Quand le mal est fait. Childhood Neighbourhood marks his first venture into autobiographical writing.