2023-05-14 13:47:00
A newspaper in a drawer, a little girl at the helm, a rescue mission, a luxury residential enclosure, night owl boys and a river with “shores you never reach”.
Romans
Aki Shimazaki, nire
Acts South, 144 pp., €16 (ebook: €12).
The dependency of aging parents; Alzheimer’s disease ; the preference of mothers for their sons and that of certain fathers for sons; what the couples present in the window and what they are behind the scenes: the new novel by Aki Shimazaki interweaves these themes with the grace, the mischief, the usual subtlety of the author of Japanese origin living in Canada and writing in French. Niré, the title of the book, is also the surname of the narrator, Nobuki Niré, son of a couple who live in a residence for the elderly. These parents have fifty years of life together behind them, and the memory is failing. In a drawer, Nobuki finds the diary that his mother kept. There are some interesting discoveries. nire is a very good vintage from this prolific novelist whose novels are dense, brief, enigmatic, both very Japanese and universal. We read in Niré for example: “What I like here is the respect for privacy.” And also : “How could Kyôko, so proud, conquer such a gentle and kind man?” V.B.-L.
Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, After Celeste
Le Bruit du monde, 170 pp., €18 (ebook: €13.99).
In Moreau, a small village in Quebec where the houses are magic, the narrator Dolores (pain and roses as Nabokov would say), comes to recharge her batteries in the house of her childhood after her third miscarriage, a little girl she had named Celeste. Bottomless sadness, depression, remembrance. Madame Labelle who looked after her as a child is still there and she now takes care of Olivia, a little girl who has just moved into the street and is bored. Their passion for dance reunites Olivia and Dolores who agrees to give dance lessons to the child. But the bar is in the basement, where a cupboard locks up all of Celeste’s belongings and the door of which Dolores refuses to open. This “forbidden” is however the key word that locks his unconscious and he invents a subterfuge: a deer appears in the basement, enters the cupboard for an invitation to follow her… N.A.
Fabio Bartolomei
The last time we were kids
Translated from Italian by Léa Drouet, Mercure de France, 225 pp., €21.80 (ebook: €15.99).
Rome, October 1943: The last time they were children, Cosimo, Italo, Riccardo and Vanda were 10 years old and playing in a building courtyard. When one day Riccardo does not return, the three children decide to recover their friend. He’s in a camp? All right, we’ll explain to the Germans that they made a mistake. For ten days, finally without an adult, this rescue mission will open their eyes wide to an unknown world. Then burst all the joy, the seriousness, the naivety, the fear, the humor and the ridiculousness of the children who ape the adult. At the same time, we follow the story of Sister Agnese and Vittorio, who have gone in search of them. Beautiful novel, funny, poignant, on the indefectibility of friendship and on what war does to children. N.A.
J.G. Ballard, Savagery
Translated from English by Robert Louit, Tristram “Souple Deluxe”, 96 pp., €9.90.
Launched in March with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (translated by Bernard Hœpffner), the “Souple Deluxe” collection is republishing in particular this month, with From the speakers by Joyce Carol Oates and the Coral Sea by Patti Smith, a brief novel, emblematic of the English writer who died in 2009, revealing his obsession with safe zones. Published under the title Running Wild in 1988, Savagery takes place in a luxury residential enclosure near London, Pangbourne Village, where a dozen wealthy families live in artificial happiness. One day, we discover the adults coldly murdered, the children have disappeared. Ballardian jewel, masterpiece of cynicism conducted in the form of an investigation. F.Rl
Poetry
Florian Bardo, The Boys, at night, fly away
Lunatic Editions, 108 pp., €12 (ebook: €3.99).
“I say fagot / because it’s my life / because it gets dirty / but who cares”. One might think that the first collection of Florian Bardou first evokes the daily life of a thirty-something gay Parisian. This is the case, with its share of encounters, celebrations and tomorrows. But the poetry of this book is also and above all a hymn to letting go, the one you feel precisely when you let the bass of a techno party take control of your body. Because we are dealing here with ultra-rhythmic texts, with short verses, rhymes, assonances (“crocs and horns / choir escorts / in a setting of crocodiles”). In short, to real music. Florian Bardou, also a journalist at Release, seeks to rediscover the somewhat wild, repetitive and catchy rhythm of the heady pieces of the evenings he describes. His book is thus an invitation, through poetry, to the enjoyment of these moments of oblivion, to «[boire] every infinite / seconds until no longer thirsty». G.Le
Axel Sourisseau
Our mouths gorged with purple grass
Lunatic Editions, 70 pp., €10 (ebook: €2.99).
It is another partition which is played in Our mouths gorged with purple grass, by Axel Sourisseau, published the same day by the same publisher, and we are here more on the side of the requiem than techno evenings. The author of Catafalques (editions la Crypte) deploys a language which by its form (fragments) and its vocabulary (“leaf”, “cataract”, “mausoleums”…), evokes mourning, that of a lover, and more generally the nostalgia of a somewhat magical lost world. “Time has hardly passed since my surrender to the eagles,” says the disappeared being in an impossible dialogue. The book echoes the echoes of old wounds (“the dream doesn’t tell me / where your insides flow / it screams why”) placed as an offering to what remains the central figure of Sourisseau’s poetry, paradoxically poisonous and promise of rebirth, the river. “There are these shores that we never reach / I scoop in vain / my vigils and my crevices”. G.Le
#Aki #Shimazaki #Fabio #Bartolomei #Florian #Bardou.. #Release