What is the summer book worth?

The first text by Adèle Yon. Meanwhile, this novel published this winter has largely appealed to criticism with its intelligence and its emotional charge. Nevertheless, The haunted story, crossed by silences, gives a voice to a erased woman.

Among the books that resurface in sales rankings. However, My real name is Élisabethfrom Adèle Yon, is discreetly imposed itself as a must -have this summer. In addition, Literary phenomenon as soon as its publication. Consequently, this winter, at the editions of the subsoil, the first text of this normalienne affected the whole of criticism by her density and her disorder. Moreover, A survey book crossed by a erased voice and name.

what summer book worth?

A family story – What summer book worth?

It all starts with an image; An old photo exhumed by a family archive card. Elisabeth, which was called Betsy, was only a painful rumor transmitted in half-word. Interned, lobotomized, dead without story. His granddaughter, who has never known him, decides to investigate, bringing together correspondence, diagnostics, interviews, silences. What is outcrop: the mutilated body of a woman and the anesthetized memory of an entire line.

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Betsy was diagnosed with schizophrenic in 1950, interned 17 years old, subject to electroshocs, sakel cures, then to a lobotomy. An unnamed madness, transmitted by the unsaid. In her quest, the author also faces her own dizziness: “Am I crazy, too?” »» Fear becomes a method and the what summer book worth? writing engine disorder. Adèle Yon questions psychiatric violence as much as family mythologies.

A book with mixed genres

Story, essay, investigation journal, disguised thesis, archive novel … The text escapes any classification and that is probably also why it pleases so much. Virginie Bloch-Lainé, on France Culturesalute “A real novel”Or “Research stages itself while delivering raw but reworked materials”. Marie Sorbier, on the other hand, admires “A just dosage, without pathos, which gives way to the reader”.

Critical reception has not given way to any doubt. Telerama addresses him five stars. and talks about“A meticulous, supported, obstinate investigation”Or “The family past, silence siles, is the material to be examined”. Likewise. The world sees in Adèle Yon a “Detective” which goes up the thread of the voices – those of the dead, the absent and the mutics. Libérationfinally. lingers on the family reluctance that is cracked, on “The what summer book worth? immense voids that make up the story of Betsy”.

The story is also that of an administrative disappearance. Elisabeth, reduced to Betsy, to a pathology and then to a silence. The sentence that gives its title to the book – “Do you know that my real name is Elisabeth?” »» – is extracted from a letter addressed by the grandmother to his fiancé in 1940 as a declaration, of protest. And today, thanks to this book, of repair.