Romans
Jacky Durand The more the merrier the more we love each other
Stock, 256 pp., 19,50 € (ebook : 13,99 €).
Back from Paris, after having delivered mushrooms, wild herbs and wood to a starred chef, the ex-lawyer Joseph and the ex-con Roger discover an adorable baby in the toilets of a motorway rest area. The two friends met at the town hall, their journeys took them apart, to end up bringing together these two dented lives in Joseph’s forest house lost among the oaks and with Spartan comfort (apart from the Godin cooker). Going to the counts to declare the find makes them reluctant. Around the duo, and now trio, circulate other well-marked characters: a 68-year-old psychiatrist baptized Karl Marx, a repentant alcoholic called the Indian who kneads a bread from hell, Gandelin and his goat cheeses that smoke, Julie Roger’s daughter, and even a retired cop, a certain Carpentier… The reader enters a joyful and crazy tribe, whose leather is cracked with scars from the past, but who have not given up on happiness and good food. Marguerite, the first novel by the author, journalist at Release, also released by Folio. F.Rl
Maria Attanasio It was in the year 1698…
Translated from Italian by Eugenia Fano. Afterword by Vincenzo Consolo. “Fragile” Ypsilon, 124 pp., €15.
The full title of this short novel inspired by a Sicilian Time.news of the 17th century is It was in the year 1698 that the memorable event happened in the city. The town is Calacte, today Caltagirone, destroyed by an earthquake in 1693 which caused epidemics and famines. The heroine of the achievement is named Francesca, but she is “Messer Francesco” for everyone, his intrigued neighbours, those who employ him for his know-how and his fellow workers. A young widow with no income, Francesca has to work, and since women don’t have the right to do so, confined as they are to domestic chores, she cross-dresses. “Woman inside and man outside”, she explains to the Inquisitor who must decide if she will end up at the stake like any other witch. Francesca’s story was told in a few pages by a potter turned scribe. His text was transcribed in the 19th century, never printed, it was in the library of his native town of Caltagirone that Maria Attanasio found it, and amplified it. Cl.D.
Kamala Markandaya the Great Dam
Translated from English (India) by Christine Raguet, 320 pp., €21 (ebook: €12.99).
In the middle of the last century, a British company landed in India to build a dam. Some of the settlers, technicians, observe the country with curiosity. Others, such as Clinton, the site manager, “with a total lack of interest”. His wife Helen testifies, on the contrary, to a “Immense and insatiable curiosity” and set out to explore the surrounding villages. Metaphorically, Helen is the river and Clinton is the dam. Accidents multiply, words flow and overflow. The newcomers’ erotic fascination with labor, seemingly contagious, rises like the water level. The monsoon will not refresh spirits and completely disrupt the project (which is not a bridge). The author, born in India in 1924, moved to London in 1948 where she died in 2004. Published in France several decades ago, we are rediscovering her. T.St.
Anaïs LLobet At the cafe in the lost city
Editions de l’Observatoire, 332 pp., €20 (ebook: €14.99).
Varosha, the “Cyprus Riviera” was a famous seaside resort until it was closed in 1974 by the Turkish army. Having become a ghost town, it remained only in traumatized memories. But the transmission exists and the memory of the destroyed house of Varosha that she did not know and in which her grandparents lived haunts Ariana. She then asks a passing writer (the narrator) to bring the house back to life in her novel. From their collaboration, a family saga gradually takes shape, nourished by secrets, betrayals and lies. Exacerbated by the war, a pretext or midwife for terrible acts, the story of Ariana, from the 1960s to the present day, soon reads like a Greek tragedy in which, as if in an inevitable destiny, the characters reincarnate the great Homeric ghosts. . N.A.
Collection
Leonard Padura Water everywhere. Living and writing in Cuba
Translated from Spanish (Cuba) by Elena Zayas, Métailié, 400 pp., €24 (ebook: €13).
Live in Cuba or leave Cuba? The articles of the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, who chose not to leave Cuba and even not to leave his birthplace, on the outskirts of Havana, revolve around this question. He regrets, while understanding him, that foreigners always question him about his refusal of exile. But the island has such a strong identity that even an exiled Cuban writer is pursued by his country: “Some, by dint of turning around, have become pillars of salt.” What is Cuban identity? Stones, literature and insularity, to which the title of the collection refers. It is not easy for a Cuban to cross the barrier of the oceans. The texts gathered here date from the years 2000 and 2010 but Padura reviewed them and sometimes retouched them in 2018. He, who was born in 1955, tells in what context his generation lived, “faceless, obedient and undemanding”. She asked herself questions that remained unanswered; Moscow’s eye kept an eye on the grain. Other articles are devoted to the art of the novel (according to Kundera and according to Padura) and to the characters which, in Padura, are inspired by real people. V.B.-L.
Journals
Grief
N ° 9/1, Editions Dalloz, EHESS, 112 pp., 24 €.
Founded in 2014, directed by Olivier Cayla and Rainer Maria Kiesow, including in its scientific committee personalities such as Barbara Cassin, Pierre Rosanvallon, Marcel Gauchet, Vincent Descombes or Pascal Engel, the journal Grief proposes to explore “the worlds of law”, and uses the law to explore our world, particularly in its political and social topicality, playing precisely on the fact that “grievance” and “right” go hand in hand, one complaining of abuse, prejudice, irregularities that the other must prevent or repair. It is under this magnifying glass that the central part of this issue analyzes the crisis of democratic representation experienced by the Fifth Republic, based on voting methods, notions of majority-minority, and “presidentialist effects of the presidential election». Contributions by Pasquale Pasquino, Michel Troper, Mikhaïl Xifaras, Otto Pfersmann, David Chavalarias – in addition to those, on other themes, by Hélène Cayla-Destrem (“The law of town planning has a good back. A republican response to the religious fundamentalism?”) and Laure Schnapper (“Compensation for spoliated musical property. The Halphen case”). R.M.
Like “War Photoreporters”
touslesjourscurieux.fr, spring 2022, €9.90.
The war was invited with all its violence in number 8 of Like, a quarterly magazine devoted to photography and photographers (necessary precision since the portfolios are systematically accompanied by long texts or interviews). What was to be a compilation of photos presented on the occasion of the exhibition “Photographies en guerre” (from April 6 to July 24, Musée de l’Armée, Les Invalides) has become the logbook of a bloody drama. a few hours from Paris. Live photo reports from kyiv, reflection on the role and weight of images, carte blanche or a look back at the work of some big names such as Elie Kagan, Christine Spengler, Olivier Roller or Sophie Calle… Images to freeze and testify to irrational movements of our world. F.D.
Trials
Jos Houben, Christophe Schaeffer Bergson’s dog. Dialogue around the art of laughter
Drawings by Marie-Elisabeth Cornet, Premier Parallèle,
184 pp., 18 €.
Christophe Schaeffer is a philosopher, essayist, poet and “light designer for live shows” : he knows what Bergson said about it, laughter. Jos Houben is an actor, teacher at the Jacques-Lecoq International Theater School: making people laugh is his job, since for many years he “walks the stages of the world” with his show the Art of Laughter.Nothing will be said about the dog, which comes to mingle with the facetious dialogue that Christophe Schaeffer and Jos Houben, tie around the subtle mechanisms – including that, Bergsonian, of the mechanics placed on the living – which trigger laughter. It is not strictly speaking a “study” – but a series of “variations”, where quotations from Kant, Aristotle, Voltaire (“those who seek metaphysical causes for laughter are not gay”), the Nietzsche (“when man laughs out loud, he surpasses all animals in vulgarity”) rub shoulders with anecdotes, sometimes profound, sometimes wacky, nonsense, absurd exchanges and “practical exercises”. R.M.