The time of choices has come. Not only for us, who scrapes our heads asking for what book start this “little (and prolific!) Back to pocket literary”, but also for the characters of these seven novels, who all face the test of existential choice, each in their own way.
Mix the big story with the little story
In his eighth novel, Draft, Alice Zeniter tell the story of a young woman, named Tass, who chooses to come back “ For good ”on its native land, New Caledonia and to become a French teacher there. Intrigued (or even obsessed) by two students from his class, brother and twin sister who disappeared before the end of the school year, Tass decides to conduct a form of investigation which brings her, unexpectedly, to raise the questions which she has never dared to face on her own origins and the reasons for her presence here, on this archipelago.
Through this book of an extraordinary romantic force, with almost mystical accents, Alice Zeniter, one of the most awarded and talented writers of the current literary scene, sheds light on the colonial history of New Caledonia, but also on its own personal trajectory by revealing the intimate reasons which lead him to choose this subject. An unforgettable book.
Climate satire
Chez Abel Quentinthe concept of choice is collective. And it is about life or death. In Hutthis novelist, lawyer, winner of the Prix de Flore in 2021, is inspired by the true story of four young researchers from the University of Berkeley who, in 1972, develop the writing of a scientific relationship on the future of the world in the XXIe century. Entitled “Report 21” in the fiction of Abel Quentin (alias “Meadows report” in reality), this document, made public, indicates that according to all possible scenarios, ” If industrial and demographic growth followed its course “, We would attend around 2050 with a degradation, or even” the collapse of the material conditions of human life ».
This discovery acts as a blow on each of the characters. One engages body and soul for this militant cause, others sink into denial or even madness. And Abel Quentin manages the effect vertigo From his story over fifty years with a breath that prevents the book from closing before having finished it. An icing novel of realism (or rather of reality). And striking from start to finish.
Dangerous bond
Chez Emma Beckervertigo becomes a grace. In The pretty evilhis sixth novel, the writer continues the exploration, already initiated in her previous books, self -fiction and ardent desire. Emma, her literary double, married woman and mother, meets Antonin, ” A right aristo who loves Brasillac “, That she would have liked to hate since he absolutely embodies everything she rejects ideologically. (” I am in the phase where we are looking for reasons to hate the other, and I know that this guy is not made for me, name of God, it would hurt me »).
Listed by this man, the writer abandons herself to the enjoyments of a passionate affair which consumes her as much as she frees her. But who also propels it to writing, by giving birth to a brilliant philosophical reflection of lucidity on desire, sacrifice, maternal love and on violent political paradoxes which permeate all these aspirations when they are embodied in the life of a modern woman. A powerful account, which manages to perpetually mix, as in a single sentence, playfulness and elegance.
The underside of a work
Chez Grégoire Bouillierthe disorder is aesthetic and psychiatric. In Orangery syndromethis novelist, who has accustomed us to transform his obsessions into literary labyrinths, experiences an unexpected shock in the face of Nymph of Monet. Not blissful, but deep anxiety, close to the panic crisis. “” Anxiety, he discovers, can, as much as the beautiful and perhaps more, give the feeling of the sublime. Provoke beautifully psychiatric disorders in us. The proof. »
This shock triggers an investigation in its own way: scholarly, joyfully digressive, carried by its fictitious double and detective, Bmore. What corpses hide behind the famous Nymph of Monet? This is the question that haunts him and prevents him from appreciating beauty like the thousands of spectators who contemplate this work every week. By tracking down the life of Claude Monet, his blindness, the trials he faced, a boil plunges into collective history, from Giverny to Auschwitz, from art to silence. The text spins like a reverie filled with unexpected impulses, dazzling, soft and bitter humor. A novel-investigation on beauty, the choice of the point of view that we adopt in the face of a work of art, the obsessions which it arouses, which resembles nothing else-except perhaps to Bouillier himself.
A Proustian quest
Thibault de Montaigu does not really have a choice when his aging father asks him to write this book. He knows it, ” A writer never chooses his subject; The opposite is true. ” In Hearthis seventh book, the novelist therefore accepts, first reluctantly and then engaging in body and soul, to tell the story of his great-grandfather, Louis de Montaigucaptain of hussars killed at the start of the 1914 war.
Alternating between the investigation into a heroic epic on the one hand, filled with puzzles, false tracks and finds and on the other hand an overwhelming universal reflection on the modest love between a father and his son, Thibault de Montaigu takes us into the unexpected story of forgiveness that the heart can claim and deliver to any possible detours. A luminous story, carried by an elegant style which, under the cover of a family investigation, speaks to us in a mute of this ” Bol-is [qui] is called love, perhaps the only thing that can hold us back alive when we are already in the stay of dark. »
Crisis
Let’s go to The confession. This is the title of one of the most original novels in recent years, the second signed Romane lavore. The writer stages the inner dilemma of a woman in the form of an ice monologue. Fervent Catholic raised in an ultra-conservative environment and married to a Saint-Cyrian, the heroine of this novel, Agnès Lanafoërt, followed all the coronations required by her environment to build an ideal existence in his own eyes.
He only has one check box left to feel entirely accomplished: having his first child. “” I expected as much to get pregnant as to see me the mystery of voluptuousness of which so many women were talking, even the most pious – of which even the priests, the confessors spoke -, and to which the popes had devoted whole encyclical. But now, the child does not come. Agnès faces a void that no prayer or a well -established life plan in advance can fill.
Anti-EVG activist, sometimes going so far as to manipulate certain women to prevent them from aborting, Agnès is a character steeped in paradoxes that one never meets in literature. The strength of this novel is both to its remarkable singularity, to the ambivalence of this heroine and to the naked sincerity of her “confession”. Because in the middle of her descent into hell, Agnès dares to face the moral rocking points and the tightness that her guilt feels, which upset us almost as much as she, triggers. A novel whose suspense keeps us going until the last pages and which offers an unprecedented path of emancipation. Never read.
Better to laugh
After crossing the disorder, ecstasy, passion and warlike epic, here is a book that we keep for the end, like the icing on the cake. First of all because, as the authors indicate in the mail of readers that they have pre-written to facilitate the task if we wish to send them to them: ” On take the face ». But also because, to say it in our own way, it offers a rare emotion in literature: laughter in tears! With A successful novel on recycled paper, Simon Drouard and Vianney Louvet Create an indescribable literary object-that is to say even more crazy and twisted than “the unidentified literary object”.
Co -signed by two authors that we will know nothing (except that one of the two admits “ Strong gaps in astrology ») And a casting of prefackers of engineering – Vincent Dedienne, Guillaume Meurice, Laura Felpin, David Castello-Lopes or Jenny Letellier – The book consists of countless dedications, warnings, prologues, forewords, epilogues, postfaces, alternative fine, bibliographies and other margin and footsteps of all kinds to read until the last crumb. And against all odds, he indeed tells a story whose chapter 1 opens on page 87, ends on page 113 (almost fifty pages before the end) and on which we will not reveal anything – so that the surprise remains whole.
Written, among others, ” In memory of Philippe, who thought down what everyone had already said loud and clear “, This farce is savored as a micro-foundant-literary: in a single bite, but with the determination to lick the edges of the plate to the end. Because once the book is finished, we can’t help but come back to detect a (without wickedness) to the contemporary edition, an praise of the absurd who would not have displeased Boris your or at Georges Perec. Is there a better omen for this school year than to initiate it with a madman on (almost) recycled paper?
