2023-07-20 07:41:18
► A prodigious existence: “The Romantic”
William Boyd
Translated from English by Isabelle Perrin, Seuil, 528 p., €23.90
By having us follow Cashel Greville Ross from Cork to Baden-Baden, William Boyd offers us a thrilling journey through the 19th century and through Europe with stopovers “in India”, Zanzibar and across the Atlantic. It all starts with a lie around the birth of this great heart in love with truth which, after discovering the pot of roses, slams the door of the home. He was then 16 years old and it was the beginning of a frantic adventure which would not end until his death, sixty-seven years later. The end of an existence shaped by fruitful chance, always seized by an irreducible enthusiasm.
His enlistment in the army? Cashel owes it to a meeting, at the exit of an Oxford tavern, with soldiers who seek to recruit. He has never banged on a bass drum but amazes them with his set of drumsticks: here he is “drum” for the 99th Hampshire Infantry Regiment. We are in 1814, Waterloo is preparing. From this “devilish grapeshot”, our man will come out crowned with a medal that he did not seek.
For this impulsive Stendhal-style hero, the facetious William Boyd reserves other appointments with fortune. A snatch in Pisa propelled him into a companionship with the poets Byron and Shelley, but also into a shattering passion for “the countess Raffaella Rezzo”, a young woman with “very white skin” and an “ice blue” dress.
A prodigious existence finally honored by a small funeral assembly, in Venice, in prefiguration of the “spectral anonymity” which awaits “the immense majority of human beings”, says William Boyd. Except when literature takes care of cutting them a custom-made tombstone.
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► Mafia links: “The Family”
Naomi Krupitsky
Translated from English by Jessica Shapiro, Gallimard, 400 p., €24
All the originality of this first novel is to tell the mafia from the point of view of women. It takes place in Red Hook, a district of New York, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The heroines are wives or daughters of henchmen whose job is racketeering. They indirectly suffer the violence of their misdeeds. They experience all the difficulty there would be in cutting ties with “the family”, which can be worth the death. But their gaze also reveals the share of love and friendship that remains despite everything in this universe.
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► English dilemma: “Take it or leave it”
Lionel Shriver
Translated from English by Catherine Gibert, Belfond, 284 p., €22
Lionel Shriver is American, but his fierce humor is very English. And it is in London that this novel takes place. At 50, Kay and Cyril promise to end their days together when they turn 80. They want to spare themselves and their loved ones the end-of-life decay they endured with their own parents. The deadline is coming, in the turbulent context of Brexit and Covid. Will the couple take action? The originality of the novel is to imagine 12 possible scenarios. It’s very funny but ends up turning a bit into an exercise in style. At least, Lionel Shriver shows that in this matter, the main principles coexist badly with reality.
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► Separation and consequence: “English Divorce”
Margaret Kennedy
Translated from English by Adrienne Terrier and revised by Anne-Sylvie Homassel, Quai Voltaire, 400 p., €24
Who better than the English novelists to share with us the complexities of the human soul? Without side effects but with an acuity, an irony without malice and a discreet but deep humanity. In this novel of broken conjugality, Margaret Kennedy listens to the slightest heartbeat of her characters, lays bare their contradictions, their cowardice, like their unexpected greatness. Everything seems right and everything is beautiful, from the smallest daily detail to the aspirations of men and women whose fragility also dreams of an ideal.
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► Such is taken who thought he was taking: “La Ferme d’Orley”
Anthony Trollope
Traanonymous duction (1865), revised by Laurent Bury, Piranha, 760 p., €26.50
A beautiful widow, her son, her son-in-law, an inheritance… and a lot of trouble! Cleverly put together, this vast novel by Anthony Trollope, a contemporary of Dickens, is the perfect summer read. He combines indeed, in a refreshing cocktail, what is necessary of suspense with a generous dose of humor, develops intriguing characters
and tasty, the whole not without a detachment which can sometimes surprise but assures of the sharpened intelligence of the author.
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► Journal of married life: “The Forbidden Notebook”
Alba de Cespedes
Translated from Italian by Juliette Bertrand and revised by Marc Lesage, Gallimard, 336 p., €23
Valeria Cossati, model wife and mother, confides in a small black notebook bought clandestinely. A diary that she keeps without the knowledge of her family and which places her at a distance from her dreary daily life and the crushing conventions of Rome in the 1950s. It is an opportunity for self-awareness, doubt and her vertigo… A text republished this year, published for the first time in 1952, of great finesse and surprisingly modern.
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