2023-07-14 18:05:34
► The shadows of large spaces: “The Night Eaters”
Marie Charrel
The Editions of the Observatory, 300 p., 21 €
No one has ever seen this legendary white bear, the “spirit bear”. And yet, he is alive and well in the collective imagination. It is true that anything can happen in the immense Canadian forest, magical, enchanting, populated by « nodnight rs »those big fireflies “who nibble the darkness with their greedy mouths”. Should we be afraid? Worry about this oppressive nature? “Being at peace with fate is his way of standing up to the chaos of the world”, teaches us one of the characters. To be at peace with the omnipresent nature, at peace with oneself, despite hardships and loneliness. Alone, Jack is « creekwalker », he goes up the course of the torrents to count the salmon. Alone, Hannah is the daughter of Japanese immigrants who came to British Columbia in the 1920s.
How will these two find themselves in a world crossed by violence, racism and mourning? Can wounds heal? No doubt the autochthonous minorities, like the Japanese migrants, have in common something of suffering humanity. How far ? “What remains after the tears, when the body has already shed them all? The silence. The despair. » Spreading this story over forty years, Marie Charrel plays with destinies by back and forth that will give the key to legends. A moving, poetic, majestic text, which leaves the human being alone, facing nature, crossed by magical shadows. These shadows that occupy the books, which still remain after reading… “My father used to say that stories are daughters of the wind, like little fairies wandering the vastness of the sky, lost, until they meet a storyteller willing to set them free with his words. »Marie Charrel has this power. Gorgeous.
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► Furious summer: “We don’t swim in the Loire”
Guillaume Nail
Denoël, 160 p., €16
It’s the afternoon of the last day of a boys summer camp. Summer is coming to an end, but the heat resists. “Are we going to swim? », launches one of the teenagers of the group. Everyone knows it: you don’t swim in the Loire. « Neither spring, nor summer, nor even a toe. » The river is dangerous, wild and indomitable. But you’re not serious when you’re 17. The thirst for life has not yet met reason. So we let the water rise up to our knees first, before letting ourselves go further, until tragedy strikes. In his first novel for adults, Guillaume Nail is inspired by the drama of Juigné-sur-Loire (Maine-et-Loire), which, in 1969, claimed the lives of 19 children, and offers the reader a short tense story marked by a singularly incisive style.
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► Family secret: “A puma in the heart”
Stephanie Dupays
Editions de l’Olivier, 208 p., €18
Every time Stéphanie Dupays asked her parents about her story, she was entitled to the same answer: her great-grandmother had died of grief, ” broken heart “, after having successively lost her two sons and her husband. This legend accompanied her until the day when, by chance, the author discovered that her grandmother died at over 80, after having spent half her life in a mental asylum. Between fiction and personal story, the novel relates with modesty and sincerity the secrets and mysteries of a family where “everyone manages as best they can with suffering”.
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► Transhumance in Patagonia: “The Torrential Souls”
Agatha Portal
Actes Sud, 270 p. €21.80
“Everything follows, even what you would like to get rid of when you leave. » Danilo, a horse breeder, has to leave his mountains because of the flooding of a new dam. Crossing the Cordillera is an ultimate journey, accompanied by Alma, the dark Mapuche Indian: “You take yourself for a volcano, whereas you are the water of the torrent. »The harsh writing of Agathe Portail takes us to Patagonia, roughing up the solitude of her characters to better pierce the mystery of threatened souls. After five days of transhumance, what will remain of these wide open spaces?
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► Of the living and the dead: “The Bureau for the clarification of destinies”
Gaelle Nohant
Grasset, 416 p., 23 €
In Germany, there is a gigantic documentation center on the victims of the Holocaust. He houses “tens of kilometers of archives and filing cabinets that one could walk along for hours without hearing the cries and silences they contain”. While she has been working there for years, Irene, the heroine of this novel, is given a mission: to return to their loved ones objects that belonged to Jews who died in deportation. Irene still has to find them, these relatives. From Warsaw to Argentina, the documentalist becomes an investigator to reweave the cut threads of the past… But “Sometimes when looking for the dead, we find the living”. Living things whose memory must be cultivated. Great story, well documented.
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► Digressions against the current: “La Furieuse”
Michele Lesbre
Sabine Wespieser It isdelivered, 120 p., 17 €
La Furieuse, a modest Doubs river attached to the painter Gustave Courbet, is misnamed when Michèle Lesbre finally discovers it. She loves it no less, lingering on its shores, ascending towards its wild source. A journey that leads her to the heart of her memories of travels, readings, encounters… The author interweaves these evocations with a very personal freedom with which we are nonetheless friendly associates. Of an immense culture and an equally fascinating poetry, this story glides and refreshes like living water – but like it, can also engulf.
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