The writer has explored for almost forty years the disorders of the human soul in books awoke concern and curiosity. Crossing themes that illuminate his work, while “the power of shadows” appears.
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There is a time when, by looking at a painting, you really enter it. The frame dissolves and now we walk along the paths that are discovered as in a dream. Reading Sylvie Germain is, forgotten pages, sink into disconcerting landscapes. Invaded to a strangeness that is delighted with rapture and anxiety, where deaf poetry in clear water, where history is advancing under the guise of mysteries. And improbable meetings. In the power of shadows, his new book, we meet a cat with an owl face, a greenish Ondin, a centaur, a single man and a host of demons. Since the Book of Nuits (Gallimard, 1985), Sylvie Germain has published more than thirty-five titles, novels for many, but also attempts, almost all marked by the question on the meaning of human sufferings. What place for faith, for hope in a world of pain, poverty, martyrdom, clashes? The painter Pierre Soulages, with the canvases saturated with black, says that he works with the light; So we can say of the writer. Crossing some of its light beams.
who goes there?
Sentinel question. You have to lift doubt. It is that we heard something, crackles of twigs, light shouts, murmurs perhaps. In the unknown, the invisible, in the inextricable clutter from outside, from elsewhere, it agitates and is also close. Awakening concern, fearful curiosity. The desire, in the end, of knowing what it is.
Beforehand of the texts of Sylvie Germain is always this moment of “letting come”, “to reveal”. She is a listening writer, on the lookout, on the lookout. “I apply myself to silence the old rumors in me which continue to spread there so as not to lose hearing the tiny resonances which cross the silence”, she writes in Eclats de Sel (Gallimard, 1996). What arises, what is revealed, will take the book to come, will trace the path of history. Thus appear, rather reveal themselves, the contours, the features of the characters of his novels, “clandestine sleepers fed by our dreams and our thoughts, themselves petris in the silt of myths and fables, in the thick rumor of time “. A crowd “others” which she explains in the characters (Gallimard, 2004), this reflection on creation, this intimate essay on her work as a novelist.
The Song of Mal-Aimant’s Song Narrator (Gallimard, 2002) makes a dream where she sees a woman on a woman picking up meteorites on a heath. “A gleaner of celestial stones” which smashes them with a hammer to extract words. Words imprisoned in this hard shell that it gobbles like so many rare fruits before, ready, to free it by a long cry. How are the sentences formed? Who stands upstream of the book? “Where does the author’s initiative from the author or the figures he puts in shape, in scene?” Who goes there? ” In Cephalophores (Gallimard, 1997), Sylvie Germain challenges us: “And if that was the question that abruptly imposes itself on any reader opening a book and preparing to venture into the meanders of a text?”
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