2023-05-01 09:40:00
A daughter of Soviet dissidents, the deconstruction of the straight cisgender male, the “insurmountable loneliness” of a future Prime Minister and a massive “request for looks”.
Roman
Christophe Jamin, the Unfinished
Grasset, 180 pp., 19 €.
This serious and beautiful novel recounts forty years of the life of Pierre and Gabriel. Pierre carries with him the fault of his grandfather, a French fighter in the Wehrmacht, then the silence of his father who, traumatized by this chaos, will end up committing suicide. Gabriel, from a Jewish family, inherits the history of the Shoah. One comes from executioners and the other from victims. At 20, they meet Sveta, daughter of Soviet dissidents who will open up a world to them. The question of their whole lives will revolve around the idea of violence, strange when it serves lofty ideals. Should we fight it or turn our backs on it? What is courage and what is selflessness? Is it fair to assume that nothing will ever change? In response, the ending suggests that in a slight way it is at least possible to complete what had remained a lifetime in suspense, unfulfilled. N.A.
Trials
Jean-Charles Massera, Occupy Masculinity
Verticals, 168 pp., €18.50.
Faithful to his method of compiling and hilarious rolling of media speeches (including between friends), the author of United Emmerdements of New Order (POL, 2002) tackles the deconstruction of the straight cisgender male (him for example) and what is said about him, plus some “Other Issues Filed” : since manspreading all thighs apart in the metro to the displacement of populations in occupied territories, passing through the phallic invention of “The Unthinkable”– and it’s true that if you really think about it, there’s no steeper concept. Fortunately, we will find compensations along the way, such as the idea of male prostitutes offering a “cuni” quickly done well. Spoiler alertthe toxic key to masculinity is given in the last sentence of the book: “I miss my mom” . E.Lo.
Bernard Cazeneuve, My life with Mauriac
Gallimard, 128 pp., 16 €.
“To feel as much as possible by analyzing oneself as much as possible: this sentence by Maurice Barrès, which could have served as an epigraph to Mauriac’s autobiographical work, constituted what, without my knowing it, I opened up to the world by revealing myself to myself.” Born in 1963 in Senlis, Bernard Cazeneuve writes that he drew on the books, notably autobiographical, of François Mauriac, enough to answer his own “absolute quest for rootedness”. As a teenager raised in an anticlerical environment, the future minister and prime minister suffered from a “unsurpassable loneliness”among his own. But he remains very elliptical on the cause of this impression of isolation. Beginnings of a life, A teenager from the past , the life of Jean Racinewere his gateways to the author of the knot of vipers . This biography, which lacks a bit of subjectivity, marries the classicism of Mauriac’s language, and paints an elegant and nevertheless tender portrait of the writer who grew up in an environment where holiness coexisted with evil. V.B.-L.
Elsa Godart, empty lives
Armand Colin, 288 pp., 22,90 €
In the past – since the most distant moral philosophy – people generally asked themselves: am I a good person? Am I good enough, for you, for others, in my own eyes? And how is my own ethical self-improvement possible? Today – since the rise of the Internet and the hypertrophy of social networks – we tend to ask ourselves: am I someone visible? And how, by what strategies, could my social exhibitionism be even more spectacular, without provoking an unbearable dislike,like: “stop, get out, we’ve seen enough of you”? What is the origin of this “need for visibility”of this “insatiable quest for notoriety” , which, it is true, can be that of a day or depend on a number of “followers” in a hurry who cast a glance at my story, my dessert photo or three guitar chords recorded on a laptop? Philosopher and psychoanalyst, author, in 2016, of a resounding I selfie therefore I am Elsa Godart takes these questions seriously – and mobilizes Plato as much as Levinas or Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Bergson… She explains this massive “request for looks” first by the “fear of invisibility”(which, when added to the feeling of being despised, of “not counting”, joins the diffuse fear of disappearance, of social “death”), then by the fear of “rater sa vie”by being excluded, insignificant, and finally by the fear of feeling one’s own existence empty. There “quest for recognition”she said, hiding “the non-existence of our existences, our lacks of being, our absences, our disappearances (fading), our oversights and other deficits of being, our misinterpretations”. R.M.
#Christophe #Jamin #JeanCharles #Massera #Bernard #Cazeneuve #Elsa #Godart #Release