In 1993, Elsa is seven years old and her mother considers her her thing, her toy. “Suddenly, I am a thousand years old and I gave birth to all the mothers in the world. A terrible and inconceivable secret that is reproduced, between anger, confinement and submission, from one generation to another. A voracious appetite that pushes a mother to devour what she herself has created. Twenty years later, in the small studio where she lives alone, “at the edge of other people’s worlds”, the young woman will try as best she can to come to terms with the unspoken. The age of destroying, the first novel by Pauline Peyrade, a French playwright born in 1986, sounds like a call to break, while, recalls Elsa, “we kill ourselves so as not to kill anyone”. We think of A story of France by Joffrine Donnadieu (Gallimard, 2019), where the narrator recounted having been attacked at the age of eleven by a neighbor. In both cases, it is about literature which expresses without lyricism, but never without force, a whole lot of burning questions.
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