After The big world (Calmann-Lévy, 2022), the novelist Pierre Lemaitre continues his committed exploration of the “Glorious Thirties”, as the years 1945 to 1975 were nicknamed in France. Second in a series of four novels entitled The Glorious Years, silence and anger began in February 1952.
While in Beirut, the Pelletier family still owns its small “soap factory” empire, the children now all live in Paris.
We quickly recognize Jean, known as Bouboule, badly married and badly in his skin, about to open with his wife a clothing store place of the Republic. An opening threatened by the poor working conditions of the workers, on the verge of revolt. A serial murderer, subject to “outbursts” which each time target young and pretty women, he and his wife Geneviève form a somewhat monstrous couple, oddly well matched, detestable as one might wish.
François, on the other hand, took the lead and became a journalist at the Evening newspaper, where he specializes in miscellaneous facts. Nine, his fiancée, almost deaf, kleptomaniac and alcoholic, continues to cultivate the mystery. Their younger sister, Hélène, photographer and journalist also at Evening newspaperwill give a series of texts on “the cleanliness of the French women” – echo of an investigation of Françoise Giroud in the She France from 1951.
As the last hours of French colonialism and financial embezzlement passed through The big worldbetween Paris, Beirut and Saigon, Pierre Lemaitre, who makes no secret of his convictions on the left, this time injected into silence and anger issues that were beginning to surface at the time. Women’s rights, workers’ working conditions, regional struggles against the sometimes blind wheel of progress.
The French novelist explores the question of abortion and, more broadly, that of the condition of women, lifting the veil on “an underground universe whose existence everyone knew and about which no one spoke openly, the space of shame and pain, anguish and risk in which disarmed women, angel makers and abortion doctors mixed together…”.
In France in the midst of post-war reconstruction, progress is gaining ground everywhere. In consciences and in factories, in beds and in villages.
In Chevrigny (inspired by the Chevril dam, in the upper Isère valley), a hydroelectric dam is about to be commissioned. Evicted, the inhabitants are invited to settle elsewhere, in the new village rebuilt above, Chevrigny-le-Haut. But some residents are still resisting the expropriation. Hélène Pelletier will be sent on site to witness the last jolts before the impoundment of the dam.
As a slightly crazy watchmaker, Pierre Lemaitre meticulously oils the cogs of this thrilling family saga far from over, recalling that “our secrets, our turpitudes, our silences, our violence, our lies are like the ruins of Chevrigny. “Even under the calm water of a lake, like the bell tower, they continue to exist.