Emma Becker’s pen cannot leave anyone indifferent. Be warned: it’s raw, deliberately very frontal at times. But it would be a shame, really, to stop there. Because it’s so much more too.
The French author, who is not here with her first shocking title – it is to her that we owe The house (2019), immodest autofiction of his happy passage in a Berlin brothel -, dives this time, with this Badly pretty, in the running for the prestigious Femina Prize, in adultery. Rather: passion. The unreasonable mad love of a young mother for another man.
Allow us to try to summarize this brick of more than 400 pages, which includes, among other things, several epistolary exchanges which have nothing to envy of the Dangerous connectionsas the prose is rich, sustained, one is tempted to say enjoyable (but that would be too easy!). Both old France and deeply rooted in modernity (it’s texting, after all).
Emma Becker tells the story of a woman, a slightly bohemian author with loose morals, well known for her sex literature (the expression is hers), who meets one day and quite by chance a a certain Antonin de Quincy d’Avricourt, whose particle obviously reveals the aristo petticoat.
It’s written in I. She is married, he is in a relationship, of course. Everything opposes them. But they like each other. A story as banal as it is eternal, which obviously goes a little in circles, despite everything being furiously powerful.
Their magnetism will be expressed first in writing (and what texts, which we will sometimes read aloud to savor all the sensuality, but also the humor and the caustic lucidity), then through three seasons. Everything begins in spring, degenerates in summer, picks up again in autumn.
Beyond the fucks (let’s call a spade a spade here, since they are obviously not banal, rather frankly addictive, and meticulously told, chaste souls refrain), this book explores with vibrant accuracy the heartbreak of a woman in need of freedom, the saving power of writing, and then passion (forbidden?) as a dangerously powerful engine of life. Without forgetting the heartbreaking reflections on motherhood, in parts that are tear-jerking in frankness and truth.
The only downside, if one absolutely must be highlighted: the ending, which leaves us a little unsatisfied. Otherwise, what more can I say? It’s bad, of course. Certainly. But it’s also so pretty (and so beautifully written!).
Pretty evil
Albin Michel
409 pages