” The past never dies. He didn’t even come by. »The formula of William Faulkner, one could believe it came straight from Laurent Mauvignier, himself reader of Faulkner, and whose tenth novel, Stories of the night, brings to life what we believed to be forever buried or of which we did not know anything.
In the cinema as in the books, it is not uncommon to find in the countryside, at the back of a cupboard or near a workbench, a firearm, sharp blades (exactos, axes, mechanical saws) and many buried secrets. In a very relative silence, the night often makes strange silhouettes appear.
In Laurent Mauvignier’s homeopathic thriller, a past appeared out of nowhere that reclaims its rights.
In the hamlet of “L’Éart des Trois Filles Alone” – which boils down to three houses, one of which is empty -, seven kilometers from La Bassée in central France, a couple is slowly “getting poorer” in the silences, resentment and dissatisfaction. Patrice Bergogne, 47, farmer and son of a farmer, tries to stay the course between debt and loneliness. His wife, Marion, works in a printing house. They got to know each other through a dating site. Between them, their 10-year-old daughter, Ida, who does not erase anything.
Their immediate neighbor, Christine, almost septuagenarian, is a painter who left the city a long time ago to settle in the countryside. Although she never liked Marion, she became a kind of grandmother to the little girl. But the woman has been receiving disturbing anonymous letters for several weeks.
The evening when we were to celebrate Marion’s 40th birthday in a small committee, Christine’s German Shepherd will be killed with a knife and three brothers from Marion’s past will invite each other to the party.
With dexterity, the author of Far from them (1999) and Men (2009), another rural story in which old stories that were believed to be buried forever seek to rise to the surface, spirals and in a slow crescendo this story full of shadow, a sort of subtle social thriller, where the terror pervades everywhere.
A strange atmosphere of violence, while Stephen King and Sam Peckinpah are never far behind. A stifling camera full of meanders that grabs us by the throat, like a noose.
Origins novel
With its dense, precise and sensual writing, over a jostled chronology, the eleventh novel by Marie-Hélène Lafon, Son’s story, seems to be the opposite of Laurent Mauvignier’s. We are more here with Flaubert than with Faulkner, but there are secrets, silences and absences which, here too, weigh more than others.
Both long and condensed quest for origins, running between 1919 and 2008 and going back and forth between times and places (Aurillac, Figeac, Cantal and Lot), Son’s story this year earned Marie-Hélène Lafon, 58, the Renaudot prize – and not one of the little brothers, the Renaudot essay, the Renaudot pocket or the Renaudot des lycéens, which she had obtained in 2001 for Dog’s night, his very first novel.
The son in question is André Léoty. Born in 1924 out of wedlock to an unknown father, the child had been entrusted by the mother to her sister shortly after birth – her aunt becoming de facto her mother and her cousins becoming her sisters. Installed in Paris, where she leads a single life, Gabrielle only comes back to Figeac from time to time for the holidays.
Having grown up in the depths of the countryside, his son, at the age of 21, will become a hero of the resistance. And years later, he has to face the facts, the place of the biological father has remained empty and the ghost of this man weighs much more than his absence. An absence that he will have to take head on.
With a cadence as supple as it is implacable, Marie-Hélène Lafon brilliantly dismantles the past and shows how the character and morality of her characters are built or disintegrated. Daughter of peasants from Cantal, where she places most of her novels, the French novelist is used to these stories of great gap between city and countryside, between yesterday and today.
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