It was the distance and the urgency, says Philippe Manevy, that forced him to rummage through the messy drawers of his family memory. Exiled 6,000 kilometers from his aging parents, he fears receiving “the fateful call” one day in Montreal.
The author invites us on a fascinating journey back in time by telling us “the story of a family under three Republics”, of its maternal lineage more particularly, hoping through writing, he says, “to bring back the memory definitive, incontestable.
A successful bet with this bouquet of lively, sometimes shady portraits of so-called ordinary people who today find themselves “fixed” on paper. Philippe Manevy achieves this by making his own memories and family legend speak vividly, through yellowed photographs, old letters and papers kept in the back of a cupboard.
In The working hill, with his limpid normalien prose, the adopted Quebecer, born in 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand, acts as a sensitive interpreter of these anonymous existences lived quietly. A story carried by a look marked with curiosity, modesty and love – with at times also a touch of guilt -, from which filters the same humanity which carried Your country will be my country (Leméac, 2021), in which he discussed his immigration to Quebec.
Alice and René, the author’s maternal grandparents, whom he knew better, lived in Lyon in the former working-class district of Croix-Rousse. Bustling with its textile industry and its sloping streets, it was then called “the hill that works”, as opposed to “the hill that prays”, that of Fourvière, opposite, with its basilica which overlooks the town.
Alice was a weaver, René was a typographer – he taught the author to read – both readers of Chained duck, a satirical weekly marked on the left. Here, they become emblematic in their own way of a country, an era, even a social class.
And before our eyes, the century passes: the First World War, the advent of paid leave, the Occupation, the frenzy of the Thirty Glorious Years. But also pregnancies and children, rituals and deaths, objects – the grandfather’s Peugeot 305, a pot of Nescafé, a suitcase full of silk squares. Their beliefs or their refusals, their stubbornness, the love that was theirs, their disappearance.
“I write so that beings and the links that unite them stop stretching and disappearing. To stitch up worn-out lives, which only show their thread and threaten to unravel, to unravel, to the point that their motives will become indecipherable. » Witness and weaver, the author pays homage to them and takes us on a journey through the seasons of life and a certain idea of France.
“We only have our history and it is not ours,” said José Ortega y Gasset. A sentence highlighted by Annie Ernaux in Years, a beautiful book of memory and photographs that Philippe Manevy evokes in his story and which will undoubtedly have inspired him. At the end of the day there remains the conviction, he writes, “that one cannot escape one’s family any more than one can escape History”. Because of the two, whether we like it or not, we are indeed the product.