“I’m looking at four years of serving sentences I didn’t think I had committed, stripping myself of my dead skin, losing my illusions about myself, about the world, and finally learning to unlearn. So, I’m looking here. The place where we disappear, where we murder, where we revolutionize and where we are born all at once. As long as we survive it. “College – or high school –, a place of all possibilities, serves as the setting for a brand new story signed by the author of the series. The mirror pass.
Christelle Dabos entered literature in 2012 when she won the competition for the first youth novel organized by Gallimard. Translated into 20 languages, many times rewarded, the tetralogy of Christelle Dabos has nothing to envy to the series of JK Rowling, to which it has also sometimes been compared. If the author of brides of winter has until now been epivarized in fantasy, it moves away from this universe in Here and only here, a brand new opus that is part of an identifiable reality. Split into three parts, punctuated by the quarters of a school year, the novel leaves room for several voices. Teenagers tell stories in turn, spy on each other, question each other and form a touching and powerful microcosm. There is Iris, a little girl who enters this new world with a keen sensitivity. Pierre, “the odd one, the valet of spades, the lousy one”, will come out of the shadows and, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, will know how to win over and lead the crowd to the sound of the oboe. There is also Guy, the candid dunce, Madeleine, the Choisie, who drags a gift of healer, Thérèse, the replacement, who observes this heterogeneous fauna, and the ultra-secret Club made up of these “numbers”, a small group that monitors the end of the world. And between these voices resonate those of so many others, in particular those of the Prince, Sofie, Louise, Émile, without forgetting these footprints on the ceiling, those of Théophile, “the student upside down” . The entire characters of Dabos are revealed over the course of these pages, offering, in small doses, snippets of them, giving the reader the chance to weave the bonds that are gradually taking shape.
Christelle Dabos has fun sprinkling her story with a mysterious, elusive aura, which keeps the reader in a state of strangeness.
A writing of the elusive
If Dabos moves away from pure fantasy, she nevertheless enjoys sprinkling her story with a mysterious, elusive aura, which keeps the reader in a state of strangeness. She tells a half-word, leaves in the wake of the characters some uncertain emanations, which invite you to turn the pages. His way of leaving space for the uncertain, for the unsaid, for the ambiguities is due to this unique writing, a versatile pen that opens onto a known universe, no doubt, but never read in this way.
A fabulous and moving writing that adapts to each character staged and that we learn to recognize thanks to their language as colorful as it is distinct from each other. Iris, for example, is told with poetry, in formulations as luminous as they are delicate. Guy spreads himself in tasty, grammatically deconstructed sentences, in the image of his marginal personality. With Pierre, we enter, on the contrary, into a torn vocabulary, turns full of grease. Christelle Dabos thus offers a painting that is both dense and sensitive to adolescence, a world in itself, naturally tinged with fantasy, in which a fragile fauna evolves, advancing with small steps agitated by great doubts.