The story is set in Geneva, more precisely at the International Labour Office (ILO), against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
Comme le sable (As the sand) inaugurates what Alice Rivaz had conceived as a ‘novelistic cycle’ in several volumes.
The author questions the normality of sheltered lives, and their blindness in the aftermath of the First World War.
This novel combines the individual and the universal, while weaving issues of the past and the present, and a quest for both one’s self and the truth, a quest which also pervades Alice Rivaz’ œuvre.
Her notebooks go beyond the realm of the novelist to also provide a fascinating account of cultural and social life in 20th-century Geneva.
In creating new women’s voices in fiction, the novelist revives the memory of the female writers of the past.