This winter, French novelists are tying and untying the ties that unite us to ours, to others and to history.
With the dense and relentless rhythm that characterizes it, Marie-Helene Lafon returns to Cantal, the land of his childhood, to tell the story of a family of farmers marked by violence and isolation. In an exercise of precision of great virtuosity, she constructs with The sources (Buchet Chastel, February 13) a family saga where the traps that damage the mother and the father are mirrored – those of beatings, shame, of the body for her, those of masculinity, expectations, ambition for him . As in his previous novel, son’s storywhich earned her the Renaudot prize, the writer brilliantly probes the deep and revealing galleries that are hollowed out under the silences.
“I am an archive of my own,” says Matthew Lindon in An archive (POL, February 13). From the memories of his tumultuous relationship with his father, Jérôme Lindon, director of Éditions de Minuit from 1948 to 2001, the writer goes through the great political and literary movements of the second half of the century, from the Occupation to the war of Algeria, passing through the Liberation. We meet in turn Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and several others in a funny, luminous, but uncompromising story.
Pierre Lemaitre delivers this winter the second part of his tetralogy on the Glorious Thirties, in which he once again features the Pelletier family. While the first volume adopted the tone and magnitude of the adventure story, silence and anger (Calmann-Lévy, March 8) is more of a social drama, blown away by the revolutions rumbling in a decade caught between modernity and archaism. Through the character of Hélène, a young journalist harnessed to an investigation into the construction of a dam, the author recounts, with her keen eye and her chiseled sentences, the deployment of mass consumption, the birth of modern journalism and the violated rights of women. A large tourbillon, precise and earthy, in which we allow ourselves to be carried away with pleasure.
After having rejected the world of work, materialism, as well as the traditional conception of the couple, the family and motherhood, Constance Debre continues its great work of deconstruction by tackling the most fundamental question of human ethics: the dichotomy between good and evil. Through the story of a boy who kills an old lady in a French suburb, she dissects in Offenses (Flammarion, February 9) the fabrication of otherness, the scapegoat of a fiction that everyone tells to themselves.
The meaning of the plot
It took nine years to Philippe Claudelto compose Dusk (Stock, 1er mars), an ambitious metaphorical and telescopic fresco that looks at the mistakes of the contemporary era and dissects our intimate and collective relationships with the great dramas that define humanity. In a mineral province located at the steps of the Empire, the inhabitants are struck down when the priest is discovered dead, his head shattered by a stone. Nourio, the police officer in charge of the investigation, will not take long to understand that his discoveries, his proofs and his truth will have to correspond to those of power. A great reflection on the decline of empires and the fictions that are at the foundation of our history.
“No subject seems to scare this erudite and insatiable athletic fellow, capable of skillfully discussing the Treaty of Westphalia, of continuing with intuitive mathematics and then with Calvinism”, wrote our collaborator Philippe Couture, in 2019, aboutAurelian Bellanger. He proves it once again with his latest work, The twentieth century (Gallimard, February 13), whose title is as ambitious as its subject, and which makes the life and work of Walter Benjamin the symbols of the past century; all in the form of a dizzying investigation that opens up the horizons of thrillers and entertainment.
A bit of levity
For a reading that feels good, we turn to a safe bet, Agnes Ledig, and his sensitive and benevolent pen. In A makeshift shelter(Albin Michel, 1er February), a couple transforms a ruin into an ecological farm, in which they welcome shattered beings in search of meaning. When they accidentally discover a staircase that goes underground, they are drawn into an adventure that will teach them the virtues of mutual aid, friendship and simplicity. Comfort served on a silver platter.
Tired of the silence of writing, a novelist improvises as a lyricist and overwhelms an interpreter whose talent he admires with texts. In A cappella (Flammarion, January 17), Philippe Vasset humorously recounts his quest for voice and words in a city under curfew. An amusing novel about chance, the creative sparks, the obsessions, the words and the music that jostle in the head of a man and give birth to the artist.