Can we free ourselves from our past? Bury everything and rebuild it as if nothing existed?
Anna Gauthier, pharmacist in a seaside town in France, has built a life free from need, alongside her husband and her son, Léo, 18 years old. She manages their existence together with a master hand, taking care of the smallest details to “guarantee the essential”: her beautiful villa on the heights, her solid family, this reputation, this respect that is shown to her. “She likes everything to be under control, her control. ”
Then comes that moment when everything ceases to be normal, when the gendarmes knock on their door one morning to take away his son, accused of an act of violence. This is the tipping point. In a country in turmoil, a social climate strained by demonstrations hostile to the police and the government, Anna cannot hope for a quick release of Léo.
In the end, we discover that all was not so perfect. That under the varnish of appearances, cracks threaten to explode what anyone could have envied. “That no one is safe from trouble, that the wheel turns, that the privileged fall,” writes the author.
Anna, who had lived for so long on “a ridge line”, demanding and unstable, realizes how exhausted she was from this hypervigilance, from this representation in “the theater of her existence” to which she had applied for so long. years of looking for validation in the eyes of others and overcoming the fear of being overtaken by your past. The words are harsh, hurtful, like the horror she experienced during her teenage years.
It is a haunting novel, enraging at times, on the painful class struggle, the fragile balance of a house of cards, yet built with the sweat of a woman who is of the “race of survivors”, who has knew how to widen its path by its strength and its intelligence, and which made every effort to detach itself from its modest origins and to move away from a youth marked by violence in one of these formerly working-class cities.
Can we blame ourselves for feeling a real sense of triumph when Anna comes to the unspeakable, when she risks destroying everything she took years to build? Because it is a deep cry of victory that we want to utter when arriving at the end of this striking story, a story that disturbs us, calls into question our certainties, moves us to the depths of our bowels. And which forces us to reflect on the meaning of success and the weight of the chains of the past.
A shard of eternity
Valérie Tong Cuong
JC Lattès
272 pages