At thirty, she has been married to him for eight years. They have three children – three caesareans – a large house, a thirty-three hectare dairy farm in the Santoire valley where they make Saint-Nectaire. They could have been happy. But the husband shouts, humiliates, sometimes also knocks. For the woman, it is a kind of endless winter, condemned as she is to loneliness and to “pretending”. Then an ellipsis projects us a few years after the earthquake of their divorce, this time giving the floor to the man, who seems to have found, in 1974, a form of peace and humanity. For the children who spent their early years there, this farm is a source of images and family stories to reconstruct. With The sourcessound 10e novel, which takes us from the early 1960s until 2021, the year the farm was liquidated, Marie-Hélène Lafon — Renaudot Prize in 2020 for History of the son — blurs the cards a bit, giving a story that is more complex than it seems, capable of resonating with us.
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