Released last year, the first novel by Marianne Brisebois, Except Sam is dead, broached the delicate subject of mourning. His new proposal some loneliness, also speaks of mourning, but in a more symbolic way: that of a life, of an identity, of the idea that one has of oneself, and this, by staging once again characters in the twenties, an often pivotal period in life.
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Lili, 26, had formed a solid and complicit couple with Julien since her adolescence. But a heavy feeling of loneliness takes more and more place in her. Until it all breaks. Recluse at her mother’s house, rejected by everyone, Lili loses her bearings. Thanks to returns in the past, we discover little by little what caused this crisis, through the look at the same time sensitive, but also ironic and biting, of the protagonist. In the present, Lili, determined to regain her autonomy, finds herself a strange and cold roommate, in a large house on Île Verte, in Laval. Little by little, she will learn to tame it, while a friendship will be born between these two solitary beings, each marked by life in their own way.
With her well-controlled and evocative pen, the author draws the portrait of an intense, albeit lucid, young woman who will find in the true and unadorned encounter with the other a way of freeing herself from the shackles of her past and of tracing his own way. Well constructed, the novel addresses topics such as male anorexia and infidelity with sensitivity, and knows how to draw the psychological contours of its characters well, even if the turn of events appears altogether predictable with its end which will please romantics in the world. ‘soul.
A few solitudes
Marianne Brisebois
Hurtubise
296 pages