2023-11-10 13:53:50
An embroidery, a man in love, poems for winter, a sum on the Second World War and a tribute to the philosopher Nicolas Grimaldi.
Narrative
Patrick Varetz, the Faceless Canvas
Still on course, 96 pp., €14.
The year is 1975. A difficult sixty-year-old, Léona, wards off the emptiness of her days with an activity that is not her style, even if “she knows needlework”: she embroiders. The canvas (reproduced at the end) represents a proud miner. When she’s finished, she’ll fly to the Balearic Islands. A former nurse, she learned her profession during the war alongside the doctor, “le gros Caudron”, who became her lover. He continues to visit her, to tell her about his escapades. Léona has been widowed for seven years by a discreet man, always in a tie. He didn’t go down into the mines, he spent his entire career in offices. Attacking the face, on her embroidery, the former nurse erases the reminiscences by choosing a black thread. We know her son, Daniel, whom she hates, and her grandson: they are at the center of Patrick Varetz’s novels. Which indicates that “the photograph which closes this story is that of Léona Varetz, auxiliary nurse of the Compagnie des mines de Marles, my grandmother. This text is in some way dedicated to his memory. Appears in a collection, “The dream life of things”, which invites writers to revisit “iconic things or objects from the North of France”. Cl.D.
Romans
Jérôme Aumont, An obstacle
Bourgois, 232 pp., €20 (ebook: €15.99).
Waiting for love is not reserved for women; she makes everyone suffer. When Xavier falls in love with Mathieu, married to Marie and father of Jeanne, he spends his time waiting. Mathieu, HR director in a large company, juggles his schedule to see Xavier. A serious car accident shakes things up. Classic but fair, this first novel features a loving trio and its procession of affects: lack, impatience, irritability, willful blindness, jealousy, guilt, desire. Among the men, he is strong: “Our bodies met on Boulevard Malesherbes. You were waiting for me at the foot of the building. Your smile poorly reflected this mixture of embarrassment and excitement. This immodesty of the moment. We were already naked on this Parisian sidewalk.” Between Mathieu and Marie, there is not much weight, and this has been since the start of their marriage. The author knows how to put this absence into words: “Nothing justified disappearing like this when his body should have done tons of it. I did not understand.” VB-L.
Poetry
Louise Glück, Collective collection of winter recipes
Translated from English (United States) by Marie Olivier. Gallimard, 96 pp., €16.50 (ebook: €11.99).
This collection, published in the United States in 2021 and which will remain as the last by Louise Glück, who died on October 13 at the age of 80, does not only talk about winter. A poem within it is called “Autumn”, it’s in season: “Life,” says my sister, “is like a torch that now passes from the body to the spirit.” The book has the minimalist form of the Nobel Prize-winning poet in 2020, but she reveals herself to be more narrative than usual. A passport forgotten during a trip and the narrator is forced to stay in a hotel, while her companion continues on his way. “The concierge, I noticed, was standing next to me. /Don’t be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, /not into the world, like your friend, but into yourself /and your memories.” There is a way of picking things up and opening chasms of depth with a singular economy of means. At the end of “A Neverending Story”: “That’s why we look for/love. /We search for it all our lives, /even after having found it.” In a bilingual edition, so that the original beauty of the voice is symmetrically reflected: “This is why we search for love. /We search for it all of our lives, /even after we find it.” T.St.
History
Olivier Wieviorka, Total History of the Second World War
Perrin /Ministry of the Armed Forces, 1072 pp., €29 (ebook: €19.99).
Although there is no shortage of works devoted to the Second World War, there was no global synthesis that took into account, beyond the military and strategic, their interconnection with the economy, logistics, technology, politics. , ideology, but also cultural, social and racist dimensions. The fruit of ten years of work, this masterful Total History of the Second World War also addresses the often neglected Asia-Pacific, North Africa, and the Middle East. Taking into account the latest achievements of “a historiography in constant renewal”, the book takes the form of a fluid and analytical narrative to capture “the rationalities which animated the protagonists”. This conflict which caused 60 to 70 million deaths (including 5 to 6 million Jews), for the first time mainly civilians, had “lasting effects on the second 20th century” and “addresses essential questions to contemporaries”. Olivier Wieviorka, professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay, collaborator of Libération, placed this sum under the auspices of René Char, since “we are torn between the greed for knowledge and the despair of having known”. F.Rl
Revue
Critic, Nicolas Grimaldi, contemporary against the times
N° 918, November 2023, Minuit, 96 pp., €12.
A very happy initiative from the editorial staff of Critique to dedicate its autumn issue to Nicolas Grimaldi, who was a great professor at the Sorbonne, enchanting generations of students with his virtuoso verb (“the other Jankélévitch”, it was said of him), but who, despite a considerable body of work (which at 90 years old he continues to nourish), always remains “in the background”. If philosophers have only one thing to say, but give variations of it all their lives, Grimaldi will have never stopped repeating that consciousness is “expectation”, and drawn from this apparently very simple proposition all the resources to study Proust as well as the metamorphoses of love, Descartes, jealousy, the aesthetics of Van Gogh, solitude, banality, emptiness, freedom, the twilight of democracy, disenchantment… Brought together by Fabrice Colonna, the texts (Didier Cartier, Anne-Claire Désesquelles, etc.) highlight the depth and coherence of his work. RM
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