Private Property

In the slow-moving second novel in Constant's "Tiffany Trilogy" (after Ouregano), nine-year-old Tiffany Murano%E2%80%94sent by her parents from her African home to a Catholic boarding school in France%E2%80%94 suffers through her displacement and reprieves during holidays with her aging grandparents. Set at the beginning of colonial independence, Tiffany is obsessively attached to the ailing grandmother who lives at the private property of the title, a country estate that provides the beauty missing in the child's life. Frightened by the school's nuns, her grandmother's decline proves excruciating for Tiffany. A sense of otherness resounds: "The world in which Tiffany was attempting to live was hermetically sealed, without the slightest opening through which one might slip to get on the already moving train." As several years pass, the more assured, but no less angst-ridden, child becomes resentful, risking her standing at the school and barely coping with her relative's death. Despite the meticulous translation and vivid prose, the novel offers scant joy in this dismal journey through the heroine's fears and grief. (Oct.)