Of the myriad of works published around the world, our columnists have retained only the cream. The list of Hugues Corriveau, Christian Desmeules, Manon Dumais, Marie Fradette, Anne-Frédérique Hébert-Dolbec, François Lemay, Caroline Montpetit and Sonia Sarfati.
V13 by Emmanuel Carrère (POL)
The immense Emmanuel Carrère put himself at the service of History by deciding to follow, for The Obs, the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 which left 130 victims and 350 injured in Paris. The weekly chronicles he published there for nine months were reread, reviewed and grouped together in V13a hard-hitting book that puts words to the indescribable and the unspeakable, a knife-edge book that makes you scream and cry, leaving room, all the room, for facts rather than effects (of style).
Sonia Sarfati
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (Viola)
David Mitchell writes ambitious novels. He touches on several genres, mixes them under the same cover and creates a work made up of unique bricks cemented by an extraordinary talent. With Utopia Avenue, set in 1960s London and following a psychedelic folk rock band, it dives headfirst into a more linear realism. But whoever has already read it will see the finely stretched ramifications to his earlier writings. Another way to be (in the) fantastic.
Sonia Sarfati
The little brother by Jean-Louis Tripp (Casterman)
Making people cry is a relatively easy thing in fiction. Moving is another. And that is exactly what Jean-Louis Tripp has achieved (ecstasies, 2017) with this magnificent album released at the very beginning of the summer. Here, the author recounts the tragic death of his younger brother Gilles, 11, following a traffic accident with hit and run in 1976. And all the success of this story lies in the way Tripp has of recount these little moments inherent in the ritual of mourning. It is indeed moving.
Francois Lemay
When you listen to this song by Lola Lafon (Stock)
In 2021, Lola Lafon spent a night in the annex of the Anne Frank House, where she lived locked up for two years to escape the Nazis, where she wrote her diary, and from where she was deported to a Concentration camp. In this empty space, the writer lets herself be guided by the echoes of the past to question the symbols that forge our collective and individual identities, to dissect the survival mechanisms of memory and bear witness to the burden of a ravaged heritage. Of great beauty.
Anne-Frederique Hébert-Dolbec
The Kremlin Mage by Giuliano da Empoli (Gallimard)
To get as close as possible to Vladimir Putin, Giuliano da Empoli has brilliantly used fiction. He enters the upper echelons of Russian power through an invented character, Vadim Baranov, known as “the Kremlin mage”, very inspired by Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s éminence grise until 2021. Retired, Baranov tells the narrator about his years in the service of the man he nicknamed the “Tsar”. The icy portrait he paints of the Russian president, fictitious as it may be, is hardly reassuring.
Caroline Montpetit
Félixe and the house that walked at night by Sophie Bédard (The city is burning)
Félixe’s house is on the move. Mountain, city or countryside, the decor changes every morning. It’s the only movement in the sad life of the heroine until a few fellows come knocking at her door. In her first youth comic book published in France, Sophie Bédard recounts bereavement with rare sensitivity. If the text grabs by frank dialogues peopled with necessary silences, the index of cuteness reaches peaks in the expressive illustration, full of sweetness and humanity.
Marie Fradette
War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Gallimard)
In this unpublished novel, which disappeared with several others for nearly 80 years after the Liberation, before resurfacing in 2021, Louis-Ferdinand Céline evokes his experience of the First World War. A sort of missing link in Céline’s work, these 250 feverish and autobiographical pages written in 1934. A literary event. A novel that is in tune with the war as Céline already told it in journey to the Edge of the Night : “an immense, universal mockery”.
Christian Desmeules
Ukraine. 24 poets for one country, anthology compiled by Ella Yevtouchenko and Bruno Doucey (Éditions Bruno Doucey)
I would like to emphasize that not only is reading this anthology necessary in these times of dereliction, but that it also serves poetry itself admirably. In five parts, the book takes a look back, addressing the recent scriptural history of the “Maidan generation” (the one after the collapse of the USSR), that known as “At the foot of the wall”, then recalling ” The dissident voices”, “The Renaissance shot”, up to the “Pioneers” of the beginning of the XXe century.
Hugues Corriveau
The sisters book by Amélie Nothomb (Albin Michel)
A tribute to an older sister, a fiery hymn to sisterly love, this story of the close bond between a prodigious but dull little girl and her younger sister, just as brilliant, minus the blandness, bears the hallmark of Amélie Nothomb. After the moving first blood (2021), where she gave the floor to her late father, the novelist explores with the same brilliance the world of childhood, where feelings are expressed without half measure through beautifully chiseled dialogues, while revealing the scars of his youth.
Manon Dumais
Billy Summers by Stephen King (Albin Michel)
No retirement for Stephen King! It is neither a threat nor a promise, but a wish, formulated after reading Billy Summers. Inspired as never before, this devil of a man takes up the worn-out concept of the “famous last shot that goes wrong”, which he brings higher and stronger by staging a hitman whose precision of shots has no equal to (pseudo) stupidity. Horror is put on the back burner here and the spotlight is on the cripples of life. And on the love of letters.
Sonia Sarfati
The Great Sea. A History of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean People by David Abulafia, translated from English by Olivier Salvatori (Les Belles Lettres)
Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History at Cambridge, David Abulafia offers us, in a book for the general public, a vast panorama of the history of the Mediterranean and the peoples who have crossed it, who have inhabited its ports, its shores and its islands. , from Neolithic settlement to the present day and the dramas of migrants. Unlike the French historian Fernand Braudel, Abulafia chose to limit his account of the “Big Blue” to the surface of the sea itself. Exciting.
Christian Desmeules
Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from Swedish by Catherine Renaud (La Peuplade)
Time seems suspended like in a dream in this singular novel on men’s violence against women, where a 19-year-old narrator opens the door to a sisterly and fatal universe. evoking Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir), Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola) and Suspiria (Dario Argento) Strega distills an enveloping old-fashioned scent and a sweet languor which wither as the story progresses to make way for a deleterious atmosphere above which hovers a very real threat.
Manon Dumais
Dear asshole by Virginie Despentes (Grasset)
Through a correspondence between three characters that everything opposes, the author paints a caustic portrait of France in a sometimes uneven story, always of great irreverence, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking or despairing. It is neither the breath, nor the form, nor the subject that makes this book one of the flagship novels of 2022, but rather its ability to recall the intelligence of sobriety and dialogue, to find a happy medium thinking that would allow us, collectively, to take a step forward.
Anne-Frederique Hébert-Dolbec
The swimming line by Julie Otsuka (Gallimard)
When a crack forces the closure of the pool where she swims, abandoning herself to the lengths and the predictable, a lady on the verge of dementia loses her bearings and tries to make sense, in the company of her daughter, of the scattered pieces. of his memory. Julie Otsuka explores here the cracks that eat away at time and the links, the narrowings like the openings, that the end of a life portends. His pen unfolds forcefully in the soothing monotony of detail, in the surgical precision of poetry.
Anne-Frederique Hébert-Dolbec
The magician by Colm Tóibín, translated from English (Ireland) by Anna Gibson (Grasset)
Colm Tóibín makes a novel of the life of the German writer Thomas Mann (1875-1955), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. From Lido de Death in Venice to the sanatoriums of The magic mountainpassing through the intimate emotions of the writer – such as his attraction for men, against which he will fight as best he can all his life -, his commitments against Nazism and his years of exile, the Irish writer tells from the inside the life of the one who was called the Magician.
Christian Desmeules