“One day, in a family, an unsuitable child was born. This is how the eighth novel by Clara Dupont-Monod, a novelist born in 1973 begins.
Prix Femina, Goncourt des lycéens, Prix Landerneau, with an autobiographical aspect that is both diluted and assumed, Adapt is a novel that marks a step aside for this novelist who had accustomed her readers to a medieval historical material, exploring the myth of Tristan and Yseut (Eova Firefly and The madness of King Mark, Grasset, 1998 and 2000), the fate of Ivette de Huy (Passion according to Juette, Grasset, 2007) or that of Aliénor d’Aquitaine (The king said I was devil, Grasset, 2014).
Adapt recounts the upheavals caused by the birth of a disabled child within siblings – the eldest, the youngest and the youngest. The way each of the three children will have to deal with the existence of this blind and motionless child, who has only hearing and touch to be in the world.
Three points of view of a narration assumed by the old stones of a wall in the courtyard of this house nestled in the hollow of the Cévennes mountains. Supporting each other in their millennial difference, the stones will be eyewitnesses of this family history.
Propelled like his sister and his parents “into a world cut off from the world”, the eldest accepts it immediately. Devoted and generous, he is undividedly sensitive to the purity of his handicapped little brother, who almost becomes his reason for living: “Before, there was life, the others. Now there was his brother. The younger, on the contrary, plunges into rejection and anger, almost ignoring the existence of the child, whom she will resent for reigning thus without sharing over the family.
While the youngest, him, arrived after the child – died at ten years, much later than what the doctors had expected -, will have to deal with the overwhelming presence of this little ghost (of this absence), measuring in silence the shock wave of this short existence on family dynamics.
Behind the destiny of this disabled child, it is the siblings which is the true theme of the novel, the hard core which revolves around this different child. If each of its members will react differently, all are kneaded with a kind of deep and guilty shame (“a shameful shame”, will think the last).
But all of them instinctively understood that they had to adapt. “Their bond was quiet and powerful. Between the three of them, they formed a cocoon, weaving in the shape of a scar. Despite or even because of the moral suffering caused by this little life, the child will change everyone. “To a child outside the norm, to know outside the norm,” the eldest would say to himself.
And this experience, Clara Dupont-Monod tells us in Adapt, loving and benevolent novel of great beauty, is a wealth which is given to you.
Open water diving
“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors”, chants the very first sentence ofUltramarines, the astonishing first novel by playwright Mariette Navarro. In this world apart which traces its route between heaven and earth with GPS, always between two waters, doubt has no place.
During an Atlantic crossing between Saint-Nazaire and a port in the West Indies, a cargo ship under the command of a woman (herself the daughter of a captain) breaks her routine. Passed the Azores under a scorching sun and in calm weather, yielding to the demands of her crew, the captain exceptionally allows the twenty or so sailors to take a dip in the sea.
“An idea crossed their bodies, they wanted to get naked. Engines stopped, radars disconnected, loss of bearings, they swim or board in the middle of the ocean, with the dizzying thought of having “kilometers under their feet”.
At the end of this unforeseen swim – which will have lasted at most an hour -, under the gaze of the worried and benevolent spectator of the captain, left alone on board, something goes wrong. Of the twenty sailors who bathed like children in the ocean, twenty-one will go back on board.
A grain of sand has entered the fluid mechanics of a crossing – and a quarry – without history. And everything will be modified, adapted: their life and the trajectory of the cargo ship, the weather, the cohesion of the group, our reading experience. The engine responds poorly, the captain with “legendary rigidity” fails. The warm, beating heart of the ship, like an ancient animal, resists and seems to be living a life of its own.
This unexpected dive in open water introduced doubt. “What came back on board at the same time as his sailors?” »Asks the commander. A mourning that has remained at the back of your throat? Buried questions?
A crossing made a hundred times, therefore, becomes an almost metaphysical adventure, far from the “quiet version of history” which could have taken place. Weighted down with a grain of fantasy, Mariette Navarro’s novel carries a poetry that radiates long after having taken us to our destination.