Fabrice Humbert, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Philippe Curval… – Liberation

2023-06-10 03:42:00

Romans

Fabrice Humbert

The Ghost Experience

Gallimard, 263 pp., 20,50 €.

On June 11, 1847, Jane Franklin dreams of her husband, Admiral John Franklin, a famous Arctic adventurer, he seems terrified. Fabrice Humbert begins his novel there, on a thread between fantasy and history, based on Franklin’s last expedition, which left in 1845 to discover the Northwest Passage. His wife will move heaven and earth to find him alive, urging the Admiralty and even Russia to mount rescue expeditions, some of which are financed. In a fascinating mystery race, the ghost experience traces attempts to understand the fate of the crew of theErebus and their sheepish returns. It is situated above all in the perspective of this woman ready for anything, haunted by the figure of her husband, sensitive to supernatural sirens and who benefits from doubt. Novel of a human adventure, skillfully braided on a legend and an underground mode of investigation, the author of the origin of violence a you world does not exist happens and ends where you didn’t expect. F.Rl

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette

forest woman

Lattes, 288 pp., €20.90.

The narrator leaves the city at the start of confinement, with her companion and their three children. They settle in a house at the edge of a forest. Kind of prose poem, forest woman consists of fragments or short chapters in which the narrator explores her feelings and nature. There are flashes in the descriptions which explode, do not linger, do not use psychological vocabulary and yet translate states of the soul. Those of the narrator’s parents, for example, united for forty-five years against winds and tides: “They loved other skins, kissed other heads with everything new in them, caught their breath. They sculpt the continuation of their duet, of clay and sleet. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Quebec novelist and documentary filmmaker born in 1979, wants to invent another language on the occasion of this isolation. She quotes Romain Gary and Francis Ponge: “In ethnology, in sociology, in history, in philosophy, in politics, in psychology, we only speak of the human. The words are there, however, and the mission of the one who possesses them could be to deposit them on what surrounds him. That’s what Ponge is about.” V.B.-L.

Philippe Curval

Face

La Volte, 224 pp., €18.50.

At 93, Philippe Curval continues to indulge in literary fantasies where one feels his ardor for life quivering. Born at the dawn of the 1930s, he knew Boris Vian and Topor, contributed to the rise of science fiction in France, was passionate about art, married the curator Anne Tronche who died in 2015. His last novel is intended as a tribute to the avant-garde he frequented in the 1960s in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in particular to new realism. But it can be read without paying attention to the references, as the story frolics cheerfully behind its heroine, Rosépine Tronche, the author’s real name, short and facetious title. Sailing from La Garde-Guérin in Lozère to Paris, and even to New York, Rosépine has the first name of her personality, free thinker, independent, tenacious, warrior capable of bringing a hostile village to its knees, goldsmith with golden fingers in the making sweaters and then performing canvases, which will take her far. Curval speaks through her of the magic of the blossoming of a style, the most sensitive and successful moment of this Face full speed. F.Rl

News

Jurica Pavicic

The Snake Collector

Translated from Croatian by Olivier Lannuzel. Agullo “court”, 180 pp., €12.90.

War always comes at the wrong time. In “The Snake Collector”, the one who leaves for the front in 1992 has just opened a kiosk and rented premises where he was to get rich by selling tiles. Each of the texts ricochets the plot around a second character. Here, it’s a kid, requisitioned for his video game skills, who entertains himself by killing snakes but will have to stupefy flesh and blood enemies. Once peace returns, some would prefer to forget, as in “The hero”, where a surveyor flushes out a war criminal. Another recovers today the family apartment, requisitioned and cut in two in the 40s to accommodate a worker: at his death, we discover a very special room (“The tabernacle”). A nurse in Croatia neglected to answer phone calls from her sister who lives in Belgrade. It’s too late to regret it (“The Sister”). Demobilized, an honest boy joins the police. He is in love with his brother’s wife, a hoodlum (“Patrol on the Road”). Five short stories by an author born in Split in 1965, known in France for his thrillers, including red water, grand prize for detective literature in 2021. Cl.D.

stories

Anne The Master

The Naked Garden

Bayard “I believe in it”, 145 pp., €14.90.

A woman, the narrator, loses the man she loves. She is then pushed by an imperative: to find a new place to settle down, to sit down. “A house. A piece of garden. A tree.” The place is called “a Beaver house”, or a terraced house, from the 1950s, with a plot of land of 200 square meters, a humble perimeter where there is enough to clean, plant, take cuttings and prune. The birds sing in the early morning, the neighbours’ elegant cat comes to sunbathe, a hedgehog plays hide and seek: next to nothing, and life goes on. “Therapists know it well, who put cats and flowers in the hands of those who suffer astray: a garden is a path to healing.” A peaceful story, composed, punctuated with quotes (Louise Glück, Fernando Pessoa, Jacques Prévert…), by Anne Le Maître, author and watercolourist. T.St.

Nadine Eghels

With Paul

Arléa, 200 pp., €19.

In 2018 disappeared Paul Andreu, the architect of the Beijing opera, among other achievements, but also a writer and painter. With Paul, written by his wife Nadine Eghels three years after his death, is a story about Paul and Nadine and Nadine without Paul. To write With Paul, that is to say that there is no other way out for her than to include him in life and to continue to archive his texts, to protect his work because Paul was a total being without whom she is only ‘a individual life and no more an increased life. With Paul is also a text about the creative process, “path towards a goal that constantly recedes”, sinuous and blurred line on the horizon unreachable but source of life. Like any artist Paul Andreu will have been all his life looking for something but ignoring what. Perhaps he had found it without knowing it or even passed it without seeing it. N.A.

Trials

Collective

fags

Under the coordination of Florent Manelli. Points, 256 pp., €9.40.

“Queer. We are queers.” In the beginning, there is certainly the insult, as the philosopher says (Didier Eribon), but then there is, by way of a fight, its collective reappropriation. The act of reversal becomes manifest for eight contemporary voices – including Adrien Naselli, journalist at Release –, brought together under the leadership of the author and illustrator Florent Manelli, who call for the setting in motion of a “pederity”– a sorority of pedals – in the absence of male solidarity. Either “to be aware of oneself and of one’s own, to form a community with them” . “Faggot, it’s an internal forest fire that you spend your whole life containing”, (d)writes for example Mathieu Foucher, alias Camille Desombre, about this politically claimed, but not monolithic, homosexual identity. “Do not let it overflow otherwise we die. Never suffocate it completely otherwise one dies too.” Choral and powerful, the work poses in a new light a central question of gay struggles: what is in our experiences, despite the differences of gender, class or race, common cause and horizon? F.B.

Philosophy

Claude Obadia

Little philosophy of the open sea

Preface by Jean Le Cam. The Apple Tree, 168 pp., €16.

A graduate in philosophy, Claude Obadia not only teaches secondary education: he is also a sailing instructor and navigator. So seas and shores are not described here with a “distant gaze”, but as places and opportunities for a true philosophical experience. “If navigation has anything to do with reflection, it is first of all because both require commitment”, and surely also the courage, in the case of the sailor, to dare to cross an ocean agitated by terrible storms, hiding the worst pitfalls, and, in the case of the philosopher, to want to come to terms with a truth blurred by opinion, misconceptions, prejudices. We do not know if there are maritime virtues that a philosophical life would arouse, but reading Obadia we do not doubt that there are “philosophical virtues of life in the open sea”. living at sea “demands as much audacity as prudence, as much determination in the face of difficulties as humility and patience”– or those virtues that philosophy hailed from its Greek dawn. R.M.