2024-07-17 23:00:04
THE MORNING LIST
“Le Monde des livres” invites you to enjoy the summer through a selection of novels and stories. Elizabeth O’Connor sets her first novel on an island off the coast of Great Britain in 1938, before the storm. Anne-Solange Muis explores the gulf (also an island) between the dreaming and living adventures in which young Louise finds herself. Adrien Lafille’s impersonal suburbia seems to contribute to dystopian anxiety. Finally, Robert Solé gives a sobering account of the history of the Suez Canal, whose issues are open to the whole world.
Fresh. “On the Island,” by Elizabeth O’Connor
In tune with the apparently desolate borders that form its setting On the island, her first novel, the writing of the British Elizabeth O’Connor immediately struck with its wonderful sobriety. Off the coast of Great Britain, an imaginary island, in the year 1938, before the storm, there were a few dozen inhabitants, including Manod, a young woman of 18 who dreams of becoming a teacher and who diligently improves her English.
A few days apart, a whale washes up on the crowds, and two Englishmen, Joan and Edward, come to the island to write a book about the daily life of its inhabitants. Manod becomes his secretary, his interpreter, he falls in love with her stories and dreams alongside them as the whale is slowly reduced to a carcass on the shore.
Novel polyphonic formation, On the island it is a simple and profound text, carried by an exemplary protagonist. Joan and Edward’s presence disturbs Manod’s bearing, at first sight in the struggle against his insularity and the clear destiny of a fisherman’s daughter of marriageable age, mentally transported somewhere between her island and other places.
Regardless of the world, the unease it brings, the young islander finds herself the mistress of her destiny. She asserts herself, including in front of her visitors whose errors and weaknesses she exposes. Betrayed and used, Manod strengthens and hardens without melancholy. On the island, we do that again “Falling into the sea is falling out of the frying pan into the swans”. We don’t know how to swim: the sea is uncrossable – except, perhaps, as Elizabeth O’Connor points out, for this young woman who is determined to choose her life. NC A.
STATEMENT. “Stand up. The history of the canal at the crossroads of the world”, by Robert Solé
By receiving the diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, Ernest Renan, in the French Academy, praising him for achieving this “prodigy” that the excavation of the Suez Canal showed, a warning: in doing so, he “as a place for the great battles of the future”. It was in 1885, sixteen years after the inauguration of this junction between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The century and a half that followed did not contradict the historian’s prophecy, as the unfathomable account repeatedly offered by Robert Solé shows.
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