2023-09-17 12:37:17
The Great Help
by Thomas B. Reverdy
Flammarion, 320 p., 21,50 €
Over the past fifteen years, Thomas B. Reverdy has become the travel writer. He took his readers from Japan to Norway into novels depicting a distant reality with ever greater mastery and power. With The Great Help, the writer radically changes direction. A teacher in a sensitive high school in Bondy in Seine-Saint-Denis, he had until now been reluctant to talk about his daily life to avoid seeing it caricatured. He nevertheless devoted an essay to an initiative intended to give more opportunities to poor students, The high school of our dreams, co-written with Cyril Delhay. In his new novel, Thomas B. Reverdy enters straight into the life of a high school in Bondy throughout an extraordinary day.
At 7:30 a.m., Mo, a student, is already on his way to class. Due to shootings in his neighborhood the day before, his mother preferred to see him leave their apartment early. “ Nothing ever happens at 7 o’clock.”, she pleaded. But this morning, an altercation pits a high school student against a big, strong middle-aged man, who has just humiliated an outsider in a no-man’s land under the highway. The tone rises, blows are exchanged. Very quickly, the teenager, with one eye blown out, throws in the towel. Young people from the neighborhood filmed the scene which quickly ignited social networks. Especially since Mo, who followed the stranger on the bus, posted a decisive photo online: next to his transport pass, he saw a card with the tricolor police band.
Precision
Choral novel about a single day, The Great Help features teenagers, teachers and a writer who comes to lead writing workshops at high school. In an impressive rise in power, Thomas B. Reverdy describes with finesse each person’s point of view, but also the gears that lead to an incredible collective movement, brushed hour by hour with fascinating precision.
The writer brings to life with the same intensity the tangle of difficulties experienced by high school students and those of teachers, undermined by the lack of resources, the frenetic succession of absurd reforms and the despair of poor neighborhoods plagued by the violence of traffickers. But the teacher who holds the pen also describes with vigorous energy what allows him and his colleagues to hold on, such as the acute awareness of a mission among endearing young people who are too often mistreated by life.
#school #poorest