Ode to Marie-Aude Murail, author of my childhood and my adult life

I rarely re-read a novel.

Sure, sometimes I go back to my favorite passages since Lord of the Rings, also the work in its entirety (obscuring those who make me believe that Pippin is dead). Or the trilogy Millennium just for the pleasure of seeing the bastards lose again. Or to rewrite a saga in its entirety AS The Sandman because I no longer know where I am in all these volumes.

Yes, in short: I rarely reread a novel. Because I tell you.

But there’s only one type of novel I can decide to take, like this one, from my library, swallow it in one day in case of low morale and/or faith in humanity. A small ritual that I have established without really realizing it since my first literary encounter with Marie-Aude Murail.

Authors who know how to speak to teenagers

I don’t remember exactly the very first text by Marie-Aude Murail that I was able to read. I’m not even sure I didn’t discover her after reading a novel by her sister Elvire Murail aka Moka (pay your romance).

But I remember very well this corner of the shelf that I used to leap towards every time we went to the bookstore with my parents — shelf on which the highly recognizable booklets from the Medium collection of the Ecole des Loisirs were displayed.

I was perhaps ten years old, and I devoured books without distinction, whether they were those of Moka, Susie Morgenstern, Malika Ferdjoukh, Lois Lowry or Marie-Aude Murail. Each for their simple and incisive style together, and for their very appreciable habit of not taking children for offal (or teenagers for lobsters).

However, the one who accompanied me during my adolescence is undoubtedly Marie-Aude Murail, and I doubt I’m the only one in this case. It must be said that he has always had this gift, both to make children and adolescents dream by passing from one universe to another without difficulty … And to speak to them through his characters of a particularly realistic complexity.

Even though I wasn’t much into romantic stories, his series Of love and bloodpublished at the time in I’m reading, fascinated me to the end. I may not have had much to do with Emilien, a young teenager raised by a single mother, but this character a little lost, a little cynical and very touching it probably helped me feel less lost.

As for this great original by Nils Hazard, Etruscologist (study of the Etruscans, important pre-Roman civilization), professor at the Sorbonne, somewhat charming and wholly immature, his penchant for poking his nose into impossible situations was a very entertaining way to deal more mature themes. Cults, excesses of the fashion world, genetic manipulation, abandonment… All against a backdrop of murders, crime novels oblige.

Admit that we are not bad at talking about death to a young audience!

Marie-Aude Murail’s writing makes it possible to desacralize her daily life

Because this is all the magic of Marie-Aude Murail, and what makes me read and re-read even today: his way of approaching difficult subjects with humor and a certain change. Oh, and his dedication to making sure his stories never end badly, of course.

Oh boy! AND Miss Charity, which I discovered when I was already practically an adult, are perhaps the clearest proof of this. Homophobia and brotherly love on the one hand, loneliness and fear of death against the feminist background of the otherit’s impossible not to finish these books with a smile on your face and tears in your eyes.

Damn, we’ve been through our worst trials with these characters and, in the end, we feel… better.

Today I’m 26 (soon 27) and I’ve just (re-)finished Meeting with Mr X AND Miss Charitylooking forward to an exchange of courtesies with Mélissa for her latest novel, Savior and son. I think to myself My Dusk for me it was probably Love, Vampire and Werewolf, and what, scandal! I don’t even count this fantastic and slightly crazy novel in my collection…

This is what interests me, my stash of books “feel good”, my personal corner of the shelf. And I will continue to re-read them until exhaustion. Because if there is one thing to remember about Marie-Aude Murail, is that his children’s novels are to be placed in all hands, small, large, beautiful or crumpled.

I was maybe ten when I opened one of her books and, like this woman who discovers an elf in a box, My life has changed. Or not far.