Literature: 5 great back-to-school surprises to discover
Self-portrait in black ink
by Lydie Salvayre
Lydie Salvayre paints a hilarious self-portrait with humor and self-mockery. Constantly bothered by Albane, a 28-year-old neighbor and a sort of inner demon, she defies genre, self-flagellates for her fear of the public, her allergy to traveling, her refusal of conventions. "I wonder if I'll be able to resist the temptation to bluff in this book, to embellish my life by telling lies," confides the author of Pas pleure , winner of the 2014 Prix Goncourt. Through the provocations, Lydie Salvayre delivers a sincere and touching confession between the lines, when she evokes the children she has accompanied as a psychiatrist, when she rehabilitates her father and mother, when the misanthropic author magnifies solitude. "Did I go to the end of my night? Certainly not. Did I shirk it? Often." » An unvarnished self-portrait. Moving.
Charles Dickens's The Exalted Suicide
by Philippe Delerm
We owe him David Copperfield , The Adventures of Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and the emotions of our childhood reading. Dickens, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is too often forgotten. This is the observation made by Philippe Delerm: "Everyone knows him, and almost no one." In a book of lively, short chapters, the author of The First Sip of Beer and Other Tiny Pleasures (L'Arpenteur, 1997), rehabilitates the pleasure of reading Dickens. An expert on London's underworld, the British writer enjoyed incredible fame, particularly during exhausting public reading tours. A journey so exhausting that Delerm considers it suicidal. Quick, reread Dickens!
The Palm Tree
by Valentine Goby
The memory is evident from the very first pages: the palm tree must be pruned. "It's a beautiful massacre," emphasizes Valentine Goby in a novel inspired by autobiography. And again: "It was the palm tree. It was alive, now it's dead." Could life be nothing more than a volatile perfume? The daughter of a perfumer, Vive collects scents and unknown words. There are people around the garden and the little girl, and life could flow peacefully, at the whim of the trees and fragrant flowers. But childhood slips away, just like sleep, elusive. A lovely novel about the scent of childhood, innocence that evaporates and threatened life that grows, around the palm tree.
The Equation Before Night
by Blaise Ndala
What if the outcome of the Second World War had been decided in Africa? In this novel, which is akin to a global thriller, Blaise Ndala recounts the race for uranium in the 1940s. For Nazi Germany, as for the Allies, recovering the precious ore from the mines of the Belgian Congo was essential for the manufacture of the atomic bomb... While the affair was forgotten by all, it was during a literature conference that Beatriz Reimann received an old photo of her father, alongside Adolf Hitler . It was then necessary to go back in time and untangle the threads of a headlong rush. It was necessary to choose a side...
Geography of forgetting
by Raphaël Sigal
"We don't fictionalize extermination camps..." Raphaël Sigal wants to collect his grandmother's scattered memories. Without adding to them. Without repeating his grandfather's story, without investigating, without trying to find out. This painful story is fading, especially since the grandmother is affected by Alzheimer's disease . And yet, there is no question of resorting to fiction, of imagining the past. Only the grandmother's writings remain, and even then, what she was able to leave behind: "What can I say about my life? I don't remember it anymore." Silence undoubtedly has the last word in this poignant book, which has just received the Méduse Prize.
La Croıx
