2023-06-25 15:24:39
Sweet Chaos
de Meryem Alaoui
Gallimard, 304 p., 21 €
It is a typical New York building, in the heart of Brooklyn, yesterday a poor neighborhood, today an emblem of gentrification. In the stairwell, everyone knows everything about everyone. “Rumor crept up and down the stairs, skimming the walls, passing from floor to floor, from ear to ear, sparing no one, in little leaps whose agility its inhabitants could not suspect before ‘to have paid the price’.
After Casablanca, Meryem Alaoui sets her scene in New York for her second novel, inspired by her own experience: she moved to the city in 2019, after leaving her native Morocco with her husband and children.
Happy mess
With her lively and mischievous eye, the writer takes the reader on a joyful mess. Here, no hero, no main role. There is Jolene who shares her apartment with her sister Crazy and her mother, “constantly on the verge of death”. In position “the oldest tenant in the building gives it the legitimacy of the owner, the concierge, the former, the statistical investigator, in short, the one who asks the questions and to whom we answer”. There is also the dog Tramp and his mistress Clara, who “even though he had put the whole continent between her mother and her, nothing blurred the waves that carried her voice heavy with reproaches”. Finally, there is Madame Ruiz, “the old woman from the third floor, tiny Cuban very Catholic and very flirtatious”roommates Jennie and Rebecca, the duo “which forms a strange couple” Eli and Audrey, Ethan who makes ends meet by selling drugs, and the latest arrivals: Riley, Graham and their son Josh. “Strange building, strange people. Even for New York, it’s pretty crazy, their friends told the couple when he told the unlikely stories of their neighbors..
None of them look like the other. They each have their job, their salary, their way of life, their origin and their sexual orientation. All of them, on the other hand, are full of paradoxes and secrets that they often share on the stoop, porch in front of the building on which the most innocuous and intimate conversations take place.
Implicitly, Meryem Alaoui composes a hymn to New York, “schizophrenic city that makes you shine with the same fire that consumes you”. Throughout the novel, the writing, like the cosmopolitan metropolis, is energetic, breathless. And the reader melts into the walls of the building which preciously guard the fragments of life.
#building #York