Every Thursday, in “La Matinale”, the editorial staff of the “World of books” shares their favorites with you.
The World
This week, the first overview of a winter season that promises to be abundant, with the new novel by Marie NDiaye, the continuation of the memories of Manuel Vilas (after the much noticed Ordesa ), a novel by the American writer and environmental activist Edward Abbey, who died in 1989, Dominique Fabre’s trip to Bécon-les-Bruyères, the city that does not exist, but also an analysis by academic Anne Besson on the political uses of literatures of the imagination.
ROMAN. “Vengeance belongs to me”, by Marie NDiaye
The fog does not lift. It looks like an eternal winter has descended on Bordeaux. The mist clouds the region, like the halo mystery La vengeance belongs to me, a fabulous opacity novel. Skating in this mashed peas, everything, and everyone, seems constantly on the verge of derailment.
Finally, especially the protagonist of Marie NDiaye’s twelfth novel, M e Susane. From the first scene, a man, Gilles Principaux, enters his office to ask him to become the lawyer for his wife, Marlyne, who killed their three children. M e Susane is convinced to recognize as Principals the young man who, thirty years earlier, during an enchanting afternoon, turned her life upside down. If it is indeed him, why does he not mention this common past? If not, why did he come to find her?
From one enigma to another, M e Susane advances in La vengeance m ‘belongs groping, seeking to unravel secrets that are constantly slipping away. As she tries to interpret the gestures and words of those around her, armed with stubborn goodwill with a slightly paranoid tendency, and with the mad hope that they will recognize her for what she is: a woman struggling to do things right and behave flawlessly with others. While the novel distills an agonizing sense of strangeness, Marie Ndiaye takes stock of the troubled forces that agitate her characters. With her, it is never a question of solving or dispelling mysteries, but of revealing, one book after another, their depth. Raphaëlle Leyris
ROMAN. “Alegria”, by Manuel Vilas
“All that we have loved and lost (…) sooner or later turns into joy”, writes Manuel Vilas in the preamble to Alegria, continuation and end of the autobiographical set started in 2019 with Ordesa. Where his first book nostalgically explored the Spain of the 1960s and 1970s, and the mad love that bound him to his deceased parents, this volume, which constitutes the luminous face of the diptych, is entirely turned towards the learning of a life in the present, once you have tamed the pain of mourning.
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