Tabitha Lasley, Susie Morgenstern, Samira Sedira… Brief reviews of the “World of Books”

2023-05-18 21:00:08

Five novels including one science fiction, a story, four essays, a beautiful book, a children’s album… Here are the brief reviews of twelve notable works in this twentieth week of the year.

Essay. “Sidewalks! by Isabelle Baraud-Serfaty

A specialist in urban economics, which she teaches at Sciences Po Paris, Isabelle Baraud-Serfaty says that one day in 2018, while walking in Paris, something obvious came to her. The object she was looking for “for years to embody the transformations of the city” was under her feet: it was to the pavement that she was henceforth to devote her investigations. “Place of memory, (…) place of the ordinary »this one also allows, she understood, to “drift”, to mix disciplines – history, economics, sociology… – and points of view, to describe, above all, the mixture of which it is itself the receptacle par excellence, between walkers and local residents, shopkeepers and workers, private and public, or even between the past, the present and the future. A future that the accelerated changes of which it is the theater give a better glimpse than many places of a more manifest nobility. The book born of this “revelation” articulates all these dimensions with a rigor that does not exclude digression, nor amusement, and which appears as a very stimulating sounding in the concrete reality of our ways of living. Fl. Go

“Sidewalks! An economic, historical and strolling approach”, by Isabelle Baraud-Serfaty, Apogée, 316 p., €20, digital €14.

Science fiction. “La Trame”, by Bombyx Mori Collective

While reading The Trame, will you rather feel like a gatherer, a forcer, a trotter, a weaver, a warper or even a shielder? Experienced in the creation of dense imaginary universes in the both serious and playful framework of role-playing games, four young Angevins began in 2015 to create a world of fiction. Gathered under the banner of the Bombyx Mori Collectif, they now offer an exciting and poetic first novel, written by eight hands and woven with rowdy neologisms. A column of makeshift carts and sleds, but above all of walkers and walkers, confronts a world where the plants are now out of control. These mutant organisms, which are difficult to understand, unfold in sudden and deadly waves, whose ebb, however, makes it possible to glean enough to survive in these inhospitable lands. New relationships now prevail between the living that the protagonists must gradually reinvent. Organizing a superb resonance with The Backwind Horde, by Alain Damasio (La Volte, 2004), La Trame is a paradoxical, exciting, utopian and monstrously imaginative novel, to the pensive delight of the reader. The social, even political metaphor, also follows its subtle and underground path, like this observation made by one of the characters: “When he looked up, he no longer recognized his people: the ragged had become heroes, the wanderers treasure hunters. » H. Ro.

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