Literary Season: 3 essential novels to devour

Chloe Delaume, Pcrazy job

The great Chloé Delaume – to whom we owe in particular Witches of the Republic OR My dear sisters (Threshold) – it is, he says regularly, ” an imaginary person ” Who ” is written to face itself but above all to build itself.

Thereby Poor crazy (Threshold), his latest novel is, as almost always, an autofiction. However, the use of the third person, the radical (and paradoxical) absence of contemplation of the navel allow us to follow the search for the heroine as one would follow that of an Emma Bovary. It just ends better! A l’aube de ses 50 ans, Clotilde entreprend un long voyage en train pour tenter de comprendre ce qu’elle fabrique avec une passion folle récemment ressurgie, qui tour à tout l’enchante et la ravage, ce qu’elle fabrique avec l ‘Love. And what does she do. A headlong rush that forces a jump back and brings her back to the course of her memories that she untangles from her memory before autopsying them. His first poetic emotions, the coexistence with his bipolarity, the feminicide of his mother, killed by his father before committing suicide, the ruined childhood, the spleen of adolescence, the writing that weaves relentlessly to survive, the sisterhood, the ‘love or sex that she conjugates all genders. But also, obviously, The meeting with Guillaume and the construction of a poetic, poisonous and dizzying epistolary work. A great puzzle that fits into an era swinging between hope to finally see the feminist revolution succeed AND chilling thoughts about an inevitable end of the world. There is really no laughing matter but nevertheless we enjoy the sharp and devastating humor of Chloé Delaume. Of his incredible writing inventive and daring. Of his surgical clairvoyance which does not exclude a strange form of sweetness. A wonderfully ferocious and moving novel.

*Poor fool by Chloé Delaume, Seuil, published on August 18, €19.50.

Claire Berest, The thickness of a hair

Vive and Etienne love each other and form a “solid” couple. He’s a proofreader in publishing, she’s a photographer, he’s obsessive, she’s whimsical, and their complementarities generally balance each other beautifully. Together for 10 years, they lead a rich cultural and social life in Paris, frothing at inaugurations or concerts, and go to Italy every summer.

On paper, nothing suggests that Etienne will soon slaughter Vive with 37 stab wounds. Around this femicideClaire Berest builds a countdown that immerses us in the head of this man, bringing the genesis of this passage back to the act and forcing its sources beyond the mechanical consequences of male domination. It is therefore the portrait of a man who has feared since he was a child of being ignored, unloved or underestimated. A man who has never, as far as we know, exercised any violence against his wife. A man for whom every reversal of existence risks disappearing and for this reason he ritualises his life so that nothing happens. Ever since he switched to “part-time”, and even more since a complaint about the zeal he employs in rewriting the manuscripts that pass through his hands, everything has been falling apart. Because his work as a proofreader has allowed him a form of revenge against those we see, those who count, those authors whom he considers so mediocre and whose work he crushes by replacing it with his own. A man who suffocates and survives only thanks to the daily murder of the writers’ words and the breath of his wife, who regularly fears being taken away from him because apart from her, he has nothing. This breath that he takes by killing her.

The author here does not seek to justify, much less to excuse this murder which appears both inevitable and resulting from a combination of circumstances. He engages in a fascinating dissection. We are involved in this sober and tense dive into the heart of a spirit in which evil advances step by step until, suddenly, hatred takes over everything. Chilling.

* The thickness of a hair by Claire Berest, Albin Michel, out on August 23, 19.90 euros.

Carole Five, The day and time

From her we had taken a literary slap for the first time Hold on until dawn (Gallimard, 2018), one of the most beautiful novels we’ve read about motherhood that features a single mother, a touching fighter of everyday life, in a tight and closed session. In The day and time (Lattès), her seventh novel, Carole Fives confirms her talent as a family portraitist.

One March morning, Edith, Simon and their four children set off on a journey. like in the good old days “, bringing back to mind the many trips undertaken in the family in the last thirty years. The little ones have grown up but everyone instinctively finds her place, ”has today there is like a natural continuity of being together in this vehicle and going to an unfamiliar city “. Go to Basel, Switzerland for a weekend. They left at 6 but will be back at 5. Because what unites them all is Edith’s appointment with death. She knows she is seriously ill and getting worse day by day. Since she refuses to agonize, to allow herself to be devoured by her inevitable madness, she wanted to choose the day and hour of her death herself and managed to convince her husband and children to accompany her.

In this family, made up almost exclusively of healthcare workers, whose mission, for each patient, is ” to keep him alive, at all costs, despite his freedom “Facing death in the face is not easy. Yet, out of love, they are all there. This short choral novel, mixing the voices of the children and of the husband, opens in half, without stereotypes or Manicheisms, the door of the intimacy of family life but above all of existences gradually modified by the mother’s illness, by her choice . ” It wasn’t assisted suicide, no, not at all. It wasn’t a death drive, quite the contrary. It was a lesson in freedom (…) “. A marvel of delicacy.

*The day and timeby Carole Fives, Lattès, out on August 23, 17 euros.

Do you like our articles? You will love our newsletters! Sign up for free on this page.