Jours de famine et de détresse: roman

A first-person narrator recalls a childhood shaped by chronic poverty, describing street scenes of ragged children, bullying, and frequent hunger. Family portraits contrast a musical, proud father who remembers better days with a mother who preserves appearances despite destitution; their competing instincts over food, clothing, and respectability intensify domestic strain. Episodic, observational chapters mix intimate memories, neighborhood detail, and small humiliations to trace how economic hardship erodes dignity and alters personalities, while occasional tenderness and irony persist in the narrator's account of survival and familial bonds.