Literary season: three new feathers to savour

Capucine Delattre, A world dirtier than me

With his first novel, The deviants (Belfond, 2020), Capucine Delattre, then just 19 years old, had already amazed us. Actually, it’s not so much the plot of this book – which intertwines the upset destinies of three women – that strikes us as the author’s incredible pen, her unique style, the beauty and finesse of her analyses. Three years later, it is his second novel a slap that confirms the birth of a sacred writer.

In A world dirtier than me, published on August 25 by La Ville Brule, tells the story of Elsa, a 17-year-old girl who burns with the idea of ​​being loved and loses her virginity, discovers love at the same time as #MeToo and plunges into a relationship that she he thinks he will realize it as much as he will protect it from the violence of men. However, chapter after chapter, the “nice” Victor turns out to be anything but harmless.

We find ourselves in apnea, spectator of an awareness, in the mind of a victim who refuses to be victimized, oscillates between denial, epiphany, shame and feeling of illegitimacy, digging deep inside himself to try to understand, tame, tell what happens to him. In this relentless search for truth and meaning, the narrator traces and deconstructs anything that might approach a form of ready-to-think or ready-to-feel giving rise to ideas, images and sensations so accurate that they remain probed.

And captured by the urgency that emanates from Capucine Delattre’s lively, inventive and pulsating writing. Because the back cover sums it up so well – and it’s rare enough to be underlined! – this story is not only that of Elsa (or perhaps the author) but also that of all those girls, born at the turn of the 2000s, who believed they would become women in a world progressive enough to prevent them from being prey. The story of a crazy hope, immediately overwhelmed. In addition to this, it is also the story that we would have liked to read when we came out of adolescence and that we would like to offer with all our strength to our friends, sisters, brothers and parents. So go buy this book which is as much about its subject matter as it is about its actual literary quality!

*A world dirtier than me by Capucine Delattre, at La Ville Brule, €18, 280 pages.

Sophie Pointurier woman carrying a gun

” There is nothing worse in the world than being seen as a woman who hates men. You can be a racist, an anti-Semite, a rapist or a child-eater, and men would forgive us better than a suspicion of misandry. (…) But I don’t hate men. I don’t care, that’s all. Since I decided to live outside the society, from their appearance, my life has changed, everyday life has calmed down and my whole body has finally started breathing again. “.

While going through an existential crisis, Claude comes across an advertisement for the sale of a remote hamlet in the heart of the Tarn. This “cluster of houses” and the possibilities that derive from it reawaken in her the flame that was lit when she discovered the Beguinal movement thanks to the beautiful novel by Alice Kiner, The Night of the Beguines (Liana Levi). Both communities of women who, starting from the Middle Ages, took possession of a space, thus fleeing “from their condition by refusing to marry or take orders “. Day after day, through the meetings, the project of a place built by and for women takes shape. With Harriett, Elie and Anna he builds a utopia of which they experience both the beauty and the impossibility. Because this novel constitutes the yet another illustration of the murderous power of hatred towards men but also a fascinating exploration of violence against women. A bible on feminist alternatives, carried by the sociological and sensitive gaze of Sophie Pointurier. In short, a great success!

*woman carrying a gun by Sophie Pointurier at Harper Collins, €19.90, 272 pages.

Julia Heracles, You do not know anything about me

A young woman, her head shaved and her head held high, her forehead branded with a red-hot iron, walks through a hostile, jeering crowd, embracing a newborn baby. Behind this face – that of the famous “shaven of Chartres” immortalized by photojournalist Robert Capa on August 16, 1944 – there is a 24-year-old painstaking, Simone Touseau.

With his first novel, You do not know anything about meJulie Héraclès retraces with an intense and subtle pen the life of this woman accused of having surrendered “horizontal collaboration”. From childhood, when her mother weighed down her dashed hopes, to the passionate love affair with a Wehrmacht soldier, through the brilliant German studies, friendship with Colette, a young Jewess, the ordeal of pregnancy or work as a translator. with the occupant; the author paints the portrait of a resolutely free heroine, animated by an appetite for life equal only to the desire for social revenge. About a young woman who once believed in the promises of the Third Reich, but a few years later she will protect a young resistance fighter. A fantastic page-turner, free from any Manichaeism, already in the running for the Fnac novel award.

*You do not know anything about me by Julie Héraclès at Lattès, € 20.90, 380 pages.

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