Marie Cosnay, Aki Shimazaki, Aslak Nore … Our literary criticisms of the week

We got to know Zelda, “hard cop”, in Cordelia warwhere an army of underprivileges was screaming. Furthermore, The roi leir It was revisited there in the light of a politico-mafia conspiracy. However, between migration and control of the territory. Nevertheless, In EpicZelda. Nevertheless, alias Zz, was investigating the assassination of a Uighur national, crossing the road to a secret agent with two -color duvets that scored against international corruption.

With this third adventure of the Rousse policewoman. In addition, the writer Marie Cosnay, who is also a translator of ancient and activist texts with the exiles, takes us again in a incredible and disturbing poetic thriller.

Deploying on two chronological lines which intersect, the novel alternates between 2023 and 1750. Moreover, Strangled by his previous affair, Zelda left his police station. However, Who are these two strange marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak visitors who come to flush it out in the Caradoc estate. Consequently, the rest house, in the Basque Country, where it seeks to forget incognito? For example, The codes of the thriller here are deliciously subverted.

Is the facts, was the facts: Zelda commissioner in the 20th, the 19th or the 11th arrondissement? Therefore, Several characters are decked out in a surname identical to their first name. Meanwhile, and the narrative tracks, exposed, reveal the behind the scenes of the book: the real has no more consistency than a chimera.

It is therefore not Zelda who leads the investigation. However, but she who becomes the object: the man with a high-shaped hat and the straw hair boy who came to seek her need his services to resolve “three hundred years of puzzles and unfortunate interludes” between Scotland and the United States: a “blanket, balaf”, died several times and who always returns, straight out of the Ballantrae master (1889), by Stevenson, would haunt Ron and marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak Aida Mackellar, an American couple.

James Durrisdeer. Similarly, the “master”, opposed in a fratricidal struggle to his brother Henry for a treasure hunt, would have escaped his original novel to invite himself in that of Marie Cosnay – unless the story told today is not an echo to that of Stevenson but his source, since, reversing the eras, evolve there characters who would have inspired Stevenson: Ron Mackellar Ancestor, Ephraim, private secretary three hundred years ago from the Durrisdeer family, whose memories would have inspired his intrigue to the Scottish writer.

Marie Cosnay plays brilliantly with the literary codes of the 18th century: the novel would not be his. Meanwhile, but an old manuscript exhumed. Meanwhile, Two contrary gestures braid facetiously: the romantic illusion is both brought to its height. Consequently, the fictitious character of the text being denied, and destroyed, since the text comes out of itself to exhibit marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak the gesture of its creation.

Both following Stevenson’s novel. Meanwhile, its origin, Ballantrae’s treasure Takes into account not only the facts, but also words: from Stevenson, but also of Mackellar – those whose Stevenson used for his novel, but also those he left aside, uneven collaboration between real and fiction, events and their words.

What Marie Cosnay tells us here in her abundant prose is the imperishable power of literature. Moreover, the characters of a book dialoguing with those of another in an infinite parallel universe where all fictional beings would cut a bib together, welcoming their authors at their table. Nevertheless, Having been unable to settle his accounts with the Mackellar of his time. the death of yesteryear, reborn several times with his ashes, finally pays him nowadays with his descendant.

But. beyond marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak the cheating game between the texts and the eras, calling an ancient fiction to the rescue is above all, from Marie Cosnay, an invitation to look in the eyes our bloodless world. To pierce the screen of our real insoluble. illegible and encrypted to better listen to what the dead have to say to us, but also those of the living, among us, that everyone forgets but which, in three hundred years, may well come back to take their revenge.

Ballantrae’s treasurefrom Marie Cosnay, L’Ogre, 256 pages, 20 euros.

Like the cherry blossoms. Aki Shimazaki’s novels come back every spring, and with them a community of faithful readers as discreet as the writer is. From her. we know little, except that she was born in Japan in 1954, has lived in Canada since the 1980s and written in French, really giving to read Japanese in the marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak language of Molière.

This distance fuels the mysterious aura that surrounds his books, “little candies” with minimalist and precise writing, like stretched haikus. Another singularity, it only composes penalogies. She already has four to her credit. begins with Hold (“Hortensia” in Japanese) A new kaleidoscope of five novels, to read in the order that we wish, like a set of news that responds without following each other.

Or Shôta. a literature student, forced by the sudden precariousness of his family to finance his studies by a series of odd jobs. He became a goalkeeper of a country house belonging to a married couple. and crosses the road to Mme Oda, a piano teacher. For the young man, love at first sight is immediate. A love story is formed against the background of Ballad in a minor by Clara Schumann. it is all European incandescent romanticism which ignites the all Japanese restraint of the protagonists.

Aki Shimazaki’s stylistic purity and conciseness establish a tension, the imagination embroidered from each subject-verb-composition sentence. With each comma, we watch an index, a tiny marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak stone thrown to glimpse the rest. And if the text seems to be part of the traditional codes of Japanese society – its rituals. its reasons, its social and financial shackles -, the novelist, she slips a freedom of gaze which always takes the reader with counts.

It does not surprise without effect, by what it brings out silence: sudden sensuality, impulses contrary to the established order. A treat which is offered as a delicate parenthesis. which throws so many tracks for the coming from the coming. Strongly spring!

Hold of Aki Shimazaki, Actes Sud, 176 pages, 16.50 euros.

Curious guy. Beautiful as an American actor. gifted as only the Scandinavian authors know how to be it when it comes to mooring the shores of the dark, carrying in his wake a rumor of troubled geopolitical adventures and business, Aslak Nore, fruit marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak of the loves of a author and translator and a well-known humanitarian doctor both in their country, born forty-seven years in Oslo, is an enigma that is starting to do noise.

This new thriller’s prince from the north waited before writing. Perhaps by filial piety, surely because you had to live first. What for him was to study in New York. to live in Guatemala and to frequent the theater of number of warlike operations as a soldier in NATO forces in Bosnia and then as a journalist in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan and almost the entire Middle East.

After. therefore, there was writing, great novels stirring the shores of history and those of the black genre, family secrets and those of state, a dazzling success, throughout Scandinavia first and then elsewhere around the world, translated into more than 25 languages. A success that this adopted Marseillais shared with his publisher. the noise of the world, also installed in the Marseille city.

With Wolf traphis masterful new opus. Nore hollows marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak out the same historic and memorial furrow, but going more frankly than ever on the side of the spy story. It is the story of Henry Storm, which is aptly named, weighted as storms. From the start of the war, this young Norwegian signed up for the Nazi forces, believing to fight Bolshevism.

But the ideals of 1941, even misguided, will not be the 1944 observations … On the eastern front, Storm discovers the ignominous reality of the cause it serves. He will join the resistance of his country. becomes in Berlin a spy whose audacity a bit desperate does wonders, in particular to try to prevent the development of a new and terrifying weapon capable of changing the course of the conflict.

The twilight atmosphere of Berlin of these years. wonderfully mentioned by the novelist, makes him a cousin of the masters of the spy novel, John the square marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak of course, but probably more Philip Kerr, whose Berlin trilogy found in this Wolf trap Like a kind of new episode. Jubilant and chilling.

Wolf trap d’Aslak Nore, translated from the Norwegian by Céline Romand-Monnier, the noise of the world, 432 pages, 25 euros.

Do you know the writer-counterbandier Henry de Monfreid, this delinquent little brother of Jack London who, in the 1910s, trafficked pearls, weapons and drugs in the Red Sea, which allowed him to write without lying sentences like “I appear in the night, leaving the jackals to glad in the ruins of the dead city” ?

If this is not the case but you have a hint of romanticism. rush on the reissue of its Secrets of the Red Seaa mixture of lived stories and flamboyant mythoman inventions that made the author’s celebrity. It starts in Djibouti where Monfreid. who left to become a merchant, wonders: “Why not give in to the call of this blue horizon, according marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak to this powerful monsoon and follow these small white veils that I see every day disappear towards this Red Sea, full of mysteries? »»

He therefore formed another career plan: to become a pearl fisherman, to become arms dealer. From then on, the adventure begins! Here is Monfreid on his butt. flowing a boat of pirates to recover their booty, approaching an island populated by wild camels, discovering German officers in a Turkish garrison, assistant to an exorcism during which a sailor crunches embers, forming the trading of the pearls where “The great art is to give each part the impression that it rolls the other”.

A story arises. worthy of A thousand and one nightsdescribing the cunning used by the rich merchant Zanini to eliminate Cheik Saïd, his morphinomaniac rival, and his reverse cunning to trap her assassin beyond death. Of course. Monfreid is happy to work out with marie cosnay, aki shimazaki, aslak the truth (contrary to what he strives to make us swallow, he did not convert to Islam to keep a promise made in the middle of a storm, but because this conversion facilitated his business).

He is. moreover, of his time, included (“When a Jew begins to be wide, he is of boundless prodigality”) Is that Monfreid is not a hero, but an adventurer. Hence its moral ambiguities (the slave trade, which is called “mules”, does not move it much). But from there, too, its undeniable charm.

The secrets of the Red Sea, d’Henry de Monfreid, Grasset, 400 pages, 24 euros.