Self -portrait in black ink – Lydie Salvayre

Critique : The temptation is great to disentangle the true from the false by reading an autobiography. Meanwhile, especially when it comes to a contemporary person. For example, But Lydie Salvayre chooses to make a nose to the modern mania of voyeurism. However, to the cult of transparency, to the injunction of telling herself. Consequently, If the reader expects a linear story, short chapters, telling the stages of his life, he is wrong. Moreover, What this reading offers is a dialogue on literature. Consequently, with her young neighbor, Albane, archetype of the bachelor who reads romances, dreams of great love, and works in self -portrait black ink – a company where she does not feel considered. In addition, This friendship constitutes the spine of the book. However, which we do not know if it is a story, or a skillful construction.

In their dialogues. However, Albane advises our subject, encourages him to adopt the codes of readings she knows, exhorts him from having a real bad guy and intense emotions. Similarly, If Lydie plays the game of literary construction stages. she bypass these recommendations, faithful to what she is, simple and sharp. We therefore receive episodes rather than a story. rare moments of life and especially few characters, few intrigue, as if the only way to respect your tranquility was to feel rather than telling yourself, to go towards the universal rather than the intrinsic.

Of course, she tells us about her identity, but only through her parents. She wants to tell her perception she has of her self -portrait black ink – father. her mother, her parents of whom she was ashamed of as a child, because modest, because Spanish refugees, because little dissertation on the expression of their feelings.

This father first, who seems to have no quality, worker with arid, angry and tyrannical heart under his roof. This father whom she hated with her sisters. going so far as to wish for her death, admitted delivered with disconcerting honesty, in response to the violence of the words she could receive in her young age. Despite everything. this father returns recurrently, to a striking chapter on a recent episode, during the Flamenco Arte festival in Mont-de-Marsan. Suddenly, an Andalusian song, which she has so much hated in her childhood, pierces her with implacable emotion. What if this father, by imposing this music over and over again, also shouted internally?

And the hardness she felt throughout her youth on the part of self -portrait black ink – her parents now applies to herself.

From the first sentence of the book, Lydie Salvayre describes herself as ” old and ugly ». The crudity of his words affects the conciseness that makes his style, which is found in all of his work. The time of writing this book testifies to this: it is the common thread of this self -portrait. as if the only testimony that it agreed to deliver was that of its literary process, without twists, without linearity. Sometimes she leaves us ideas written in bulk, sometimes anecdotes, never portraits, apart from Albane she needs to find transcendence. This self -portrait is not the first of the kind it offers. since in 2009, it writes BWfor her companion, where she then transcribes the secrets of her subject, quoted here simply as “Bernard”, familiar, but which remains in its non -literary intimacy.

“I write between two languages. ” self -portrait black ink – she confides, both cultivated, sometimes haughty, and that of the street, of the time, simple thoughts. But her two languages ​​are those inherited from her parents. the “Fragnol” which she herself described as “arms of honor to the dominant language” when she came out Not cry Goncourt 2014. And in this book. it is the keys to understanding her work that she gives us, because it is only a question of that, of her work, of this world in which she thirsts to explore everything, literature.

This literature with a large L, it feels both a great deference and a desire to tame it. It may explain how she came there late. in parallel with a professional career as a psychiatrist, where she was already trying to understand the pangs of human nature.

P107: “Didn’t you understand that it was only in the face of black. the nullity self -portrait black ink – of things that light could be conceived?” »»

To write. you need a dark material, a subject that will light up, and that’s what it tries to deliver us to this self -portrait in black ink. “I write because I don’t know how to speak,” she says. In any case. she expresses himself and through her, a look at a life of the one who sought to understand the emotions of her childhood, her literary refuge, her call of writing.

224 pages
20 €
13,99 € epub