Without looking alike, three recent novels plunge us into the ups and downs of female friendship. A world of beauty and appearances, of intimacy and ugliness, of discoveries, oaths and existential questions.
In the year 2000, Elisa and Beatrice met in a small town of 35,000 inhabitants on the Tuscan coast, in Italy. For a few years, despite their differences (“the diva and the intellectual”), between concrete and the beach, fashion, music, literature and boys, the two teenagers will jointly build their dreams for the future and swear unconditional friendship, before suddenly losing sight of each other.
After 13 years of silence, Elisa, the narrator ofA friendship, the fifth title of the Italian Silvia Avallone, comes across her teenage diaries and decides to face the ghost of this all-consuming friendship and start writing the novel she has always wanted to write. At 33, she is a university lecturer, while Beatrice, still in a class of her own, has become a huge fashion and film star.
From Biella to the Tuscan Riviera and as far as Bologna, haunted by the Lying and spell by Elsa Morante A friendship takes the form of a learning novel, crossed by a few strong themes: the dictatorship of appearances, exclusive and totalitarian friendship, the chaos of adolescence.
A bit like she had done with of steel (Liana Levi, 2012), Silvia Avallone feeds on the dreams of beauty and escape of two young women at this crucial age when a personality is formed. A story of illusions and betrayals.
Friends forever
On an island in the Spanish archipelago of the Canaries, in a small village clinging to the mountainside, two friends barely out of childhood try to deceive their boredom and their budding desires during a scorching and elastic summer.
The unnamed narrator of The sister I always wanted, by the Spaniard Andrea Abreu, envies her friend Isora, more rebellious. She who already has her period, small breasts and hair between her legs, in addition to this piercing and casual way of addressing adults.
In an oral and raw language, Andrea Abreu recounts the sensual and somewhat animal awakening of these two idle kids at the dawn of adolescence. They who live from day to day like two little puppies that nothing should separate, “because if there was one thing I knew it was that Isora and I were made as things are made that are born to live and die together “.
They do everything together and “rub”, alone or in pairs, since they were very small. Their quarrels followed by sulks translate into gestures rather than tears: “I rubbed myself until the sun went down, until the house shook, until the walls of the ravines crumbled and bring down the pines and the dragon trees, until the dragon trees spit their milk, until the medlars and the donkeys fall. I rubbed myself until I imagined that the volcano was waking up. »
With beauty and audacity, Andrea Abreu brilliantly restores the flashes, discoveries and boredom of childhood. Here too, while tragedy lurks, it is the feeling of loss that compels us to tell.
Emulation, jerks and long silence
“There comes an age when you can laugh at dinner and kill yourself in the morning. “After the suicide at 46 of her friend Adèle, Rachel, a famous writer, hotly tells the story of their friendship made up of emulation, jerks and long years of silence. Very early on, those who had been nicknamed “the Slayers” in adolescence were both united and separated by a powerful spirit of competition which was embodied in Rachel’s “bilingual dream”: obtaining her maths-physics baccalaureate and having read Proust (here, we would say “doing one’s pure sciences”).
Adèle will become a world-class mathematician, while Rachel will be a Virginia Woolf specialist and a successful novelist who “always tells scientific and literary stories”. The suicide of the first will put an abrupt end to their permanent comparison, causing the second a wave of shock mixed with both amazement and relief – with a hint of guilt.
Born in 1966, French novelist Nathalie Azoulai received the Prix Médicis for Titus did not like Berenice (POL, 2015). She performs with The perfect girl a talkative and cerebral memory exercise.
Unlike the wild little girls who are embodied in The sister I always wanted Where A friendshipthere is nothing overflowing in the two friends of The perfect girl. “Our friendship did not seep out. There were no kisses or hugs in it, no fiery oaths, no tears or mixed blood. Nothing of all the jumble that we sometimes saw in American films where the girls swoon over their amazing bonds. »
Far, far from the narrative principles of Show, don’t tell (Show, don’t tell) dear to Chekhov, Nathalie Azoulai only recounts this long interrupted friendship from a distance. Yes The perfect girl carries an interesting reflection on the relationship of girls to science, the story of the narrator, where very little emotion emerges, ultimately remains a weak attempt to understand the definitive gesture of her friend. A long story that gives as little to see as to experience.