Halfway through his teaching career, Peter goes on the run on the first day of school. Around Lac Soleil, a doctor welcomes teenagers to conversion therapy disguised as a summer camp. Feet in stirrups, Anabel gives birth to a baby, three turns of the cord around her neck.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
This is the title of the collection: Three turns of cord for 33 colorful stories, imprinted with suffering, singularity and emancipation.
After a detour to the novel, Emmanuelle Cornu, who had been a finalist for the Grand Prix littéraire Archambault for her first collection of short stories Jesus, Cassandra and the young ladies, returns to the short format to which his nervous and hatched style lends itself well, rhythmic although sometimes too intense. In this collection in three chapters, where the characters go from decline to the instinct of survival, then to light, she embraces themes that are dear to her, on the dark side but not without humor: motherhood, depression, homosexuality and education, which she knows well since she has been working in this profession for 20 years.
Above all, she plunges with an open heart into the trauma of the miscarriage. And these are the most successful texts of the collection. Thirty-three short stories in 168 pages, inevitably there are certain stories that remain in the plan and characters that we only salute. In the case of Mathilde, “ghost baby who wanders around the world”, we come back to it in more than one short story, like a presence that we never forget.
Three turns of cord
Emmanuelle Cornu
Druid
168 pages