How many novels take us to the guts to the point of having goosebumps long after having closed them, just to lay eyes on the cover?
Posted yesterday at 4:00 p.m.
The summer when everything melted is Tiffany McDaniel’s first novel, which she wrote when she was 31, four years before Bettythe title that revealed this young American writer barely two years ago, winning a number of prizes (including the Prix des libraires du Québec).
We are in a fictional small town in his native Ohio, in 1984. In the heart of the Bible Belt. Where it is still God who makes the law.
The narrator, Fielding, looks back on this torrid summer which will split his life into a before and an after. Everyone is on edge due to the unusual heat that has hit the city. His father, a prosecutor who is haunted by the principles of justice, good and evil, has the idea of placing an unusual advertisement in the newspaper inviting the devil to visit him.
This is how, against all odds, the family will welcome a black orphan who claims to be the devil himself. The arrival of the teenager in this small white town will lead to a series of tragic events, betraying a racism with deep roots.
For Fielding, this boy who will follow him in his wanderings in the fields and the hills will be like a brother; but he will pay for this unfailing friendship with the loss of his innocence and the discovery of the violence of men. This summer of “disintegration”, as he will end up calling it, will get the better of his world of recklessness and will define the broken man he will become, and of which we glimpse bits throughout the narration.
Sublime initiatory story, carried by the incandescent pen of Tiffany McDaniel and a translation of great elegance which reveals all its poetry, The summer when everything melted is a novel about the fear of the other, the ravages of faith and the loves that destroy everything in their path. A novel written with astonishing maturity and an understanding of life that equally conveys tolerance, indulgence and compassion, without ever giving the impression of preaching.
There is no doubt that the writer, with her composure in writing and her immeasurable sensitivity in describing human tragedies and the legacy of a history bathed in blood, is on the way to becoming one of the names that count American literature.
The summer when everything melted
Tiffany McDaniel (translated from English by François Happe)
Gallmeister
480 pages