In the folds of the Jura
Pierric Bailly knows the Jura as his garden, if he has one. And for good reason, he was born there! Why therefore seek another decor than these platforms and these valleys to deposit the three main characters of this story that is both feverish and elegiac, telluric and sentimental. The first, Julien, is a shepherd. The second, Alexandre, a former best boarding friend at the Lycée du Premier, became a veterinarian and an environmentalist. The third, Nadia, is the wife of the second. Julien is about to change his life by planning to accompany his girlfriend in Reunion, Héloïse, named professor there. He is not sure to want to leave her sheep and landscapes.
Lonely, connected to grandiose nature, it can “stay hours not to move, even in bad weather, hidden under [s]We urge, the ass placed on a poubelle bag, soaked shoes and pants and the spirit that widespread » .Life, adolescence that clings, ambiguous bonds will finally anchor it even more deeply in its universe. When he learns that Alexandre is imprisoned for murder, he flies to the aid of Nadia. To his high school friend, a double sublimated by himself, Julien had borrowed his laughter, his manners. Why not his wife. The meeting can wait …
Lightning, by Pierric Bailly, folio, 432 pages, 9.50 euros.
Forever she and him
It has been a few years since Jean-Pierre Montal has composed one of the most elegantly discreet works of this time. His latest novel, To face north is undoubtedly the most emblematic, the most disturbing and the most accomplished of his art of the progressive sliding of reality. It is an evening in Paris. One evening in February. Nowadays. On the side of a Parisian art and essay cinema which projects this kind of epitomé of the love film, Mélo sublime as much as sentimental comedy, thatShe and him by Leo McCarey with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Pierre, the narrator, meets Florence, a secret, discreet woman, manifestly older than him.
He is forty-eight years old, she has seventy-two … So of course, the connection they barely start, with a thousand precautions and delicacy, will be fragile. And soon dissipated between two trips and some misunderstandings. Pierre will seek Florence far, until Vienne and in the 1970s. It looks like Barbara sing, “It is midnight tonight in Vienna / my love you have to come»…To read the tight heart.
The north face, by Jean-Pierre Montal, points, 192 pages, 6.95 euros.
Philippe Laughs and Olivier Mony