THE MORNING LIST
The favorites in our selection have varied intentions: to restore Katherine Mansfield’s place in the history of the literary avant-gardes; helping a family secret come to the surface, with Sylvain Prudhomme; making the scars of intimate and collective history speak, with the Israeli Zeruya Shalev; trying to understand the roots of the war in Ukraine, with Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plokhy; take the pulse of Italy’s two pivotal years, between 1938 and 1940, when the country entered the war alongside Nazi Germany, with the third volume of Antonio Scurati’s novel cycle devoted to Mussolini.
BIOGRAPHY. “Katherine Mansfield.” Stay alive at all costs”, by Henriette Levillain
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) said “jealous” by Katherine Mansfield, her own writing “modern”, fast, elliptical. A century after her death – she was born in New Zealand in 1888 and died of tuberculosis, in France, barely thirty-five years later – Henriette Levillain, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, has written a fascinating biography of this legendary short story writer. who wanted “examine things that are visible and those that are not”. The classic construction follows the course of a life marked by numerous wounds: difficult relationships with the mother; thwarted vocation of cellist; death of brother during the First World War…
So many evils which did not prevent the author from La Garden-Party (1922; collected in The news. The complete, Stock, 2006) to burn his brief existence at both ends. But what is most striking is less the freedom of the liberated woman than her profound fragility due to an incurable abandonment syndrome. Until the end, Mansfield’s only true refuge remained his writing. Numerous samples in English allow us to better gauge the writer’s musical approach, her enjoyable play on sounds, alliterations, and dissonances. A literary Cubism, brilliant and daring, which makes us want to immediately restore its place in the history of the avant-gardes. Fl. N.
“Katherine Mansfield.” Stay alive at all costs”, by Henriette Levillain, Flammarion, 320 p., €21, digital €14.
NOVEL. “The Child in the Taxi”, by Sylvain Prudhomme
One day, Simon decides to follow the path of silence chosen by his family, to bring to light a buried secret – a missing uncle, the hidden son of his grandfather. His quest unfolds patiently: faced with his family, who refuse to remember, he digs into the past. On this uneven path, that of the collective creation of a family secret, he goes back up the thread – like an amputated limb, this phantom organ is missing from all the others. Sylvain Prudhomme sharpens here broad spectrum sentences in which we would like to wrap ourselves. His novel is an investigation, antithesis and repair, to bring into the genealogy the unwanted offspring who did not have the right to be included there.
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2023-09-20 22:30:06
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