Gwenaëlle Aubry, sections of Covid – Libération

Article reserved for subscribers

The Livres de Libédossier notebookIn “Zone Base vie”, the philosopher and novelist enters a fictional building which concentrates the diversity of society.

It took courage to exhume, dissect, decipher a period that many wish to forget, this pandemic which, suddenly, froze the entire world in a situation of permanent waiting: for a treatment, for a vaccine, of an authorization to go out, to walk, to study, to love or to say goodbye to our dead. Gwenaëlle Aubry has no shortage of it, she has never hesitated to confront difficult subjects. This is because she is also a philosopher and, as such, capable of taking a step back from events and restoring their substance as a life lesson.

In Zone base viehis latest novel, is a sacred life lesson that we receive when entering this fictional building which concentrates the diversity of society. There is a child whose parents have just separated, a lonely old man who has just reunited with his childhood sweetheart, a conspiratorial entrepreneur, a student, a construction worker, a lawyer, a pregnant woman whose husband is going crazy …At the beginning, we read their portraits as short stories which, each one, contains a world in itself. And then, over the pages, connections are made or undone, the characters become familiar, we become attached to some, in particular to Georges Szulewicz, on the first floor right, our favorite, whose adventures we watch with impatience.

“Garel, summer 43. Head of gold with head of jet”

Professor Szulewicz is “an eminent Hellenist whose works on late antique philosophy are authoritative throughout the world.” More