Hello all.
That's it, the shelves of bookstores were filled to the brim of new novels in Sunday clothes, who proudly display their banners, photos of the author, catchy words seeking to attract the attention of Jury Prize as the lightning rod lightning ... Already the stars of the season monopolize the media, even by their absence everywhere ... And in this ocean, the tidal wave, I would not claim to have read everything, or even read enough to claim to embrace the whole. But I immersed myself in thirteen books, and I have identified eight. Eight novels, eight voices of writers, eight stories rustling of this mixture between the private and extimate this mysterious alchemy between oneself and the person who builds a fiction truer than reality. So here we go, I take you on trails sometimes steep, slippery and difficult, but you always come back transformed, touched, moved.
To begin, we ship to New Orleans, do you want. The dark days of Hurricane Katrina. Or rather, just before. Before the storm. When she was in the air like a threat you should know smell, like the old sea wolves Look at this old black woman with half-closed eyes, in his rocking chair on the veranda of his modest home. Her name is Josephine Linc. Steelson, and she knows it. She knows what happens. She knows nothing, after, will never be the same. It is a mixed voices of Hurricane , 
Laurent Gaude's novel into an opera end of the world, woven of incantations and shattered destinies. Laurent Gaude love broken characters, and reading this book, you can not prove him wrong. Because they are the most beautiful. Those of Hurricane belong to the caste of the poor: a convict, a woman whose life is a failure and a burden on the child, a man who wanted to live the adventure edge of a oil rig and has lost his dreams and his flamboyance, a pastor trend lit ... Hurricane has the strength and power of the storm he invokes, and the breath of the wind will break it all apart in its path, laying bare all, to shake them until their depths, probe what the standing:
"The whole city has buggered off and they left behind which the negroes have their legs to run because those, nobody wants it. We will stay there and come what may. I'm not afraid. I feel it coming. That's good. The men scamper, they are wrong. They should stay to see that their houses are nothing, that their cities are fragile, that their cars are turning downwind. They should stay because everything they have built will be scanned. There will be more money, more commerce and activity. We are not on the scale of what's coming. The wind will blow and he laughs at us, we do not even feel. Rivers overflow and trees crack. Anger that we will come over. That's good. Men who stay and it will be better than others. We will lose everything. We'll hang our poor lives like insects to the branch but we are in the world of naked truth. The wind does not belong to us not. Neither the bayous. Neither the strength of Mississippi. All that we tolerate most often, but sometimes, like today, we must face the wrath of the world that burp. Nature can do more of our presence, we feel the piercing, the search and always dirty. She writhes and contracts with rage. Me, Josephine Linc. Steelson, poor black woman in the middle of the storm, I know that nature will speak. I'll be tiny, but I can not wait, because there's nobility to feel his insignificance, nobility namely a gust of wind can sweep away our lives and leave nothing behind, not even a vague recollection of a little life. "
But this chaos, this work of destruction that seems to work without a god thank you, may remove an item. And what is shattered hope, love, forgiveness, reparation. Keanu Thus, this man who once left the city to test his own strength in the high seas, he returns in the breath of the storm, against the tide of these lines of people fleeing the hurricane. But he forgot that someone out there. A woman. Rose. That absence has made him essential. Like all the other characters in the novel, Keanu has this movement burst of bravado, this movement of resistance and freedom. Make his life something that is not a mess. In Over a haunting Apocalypse emerges the last song of solidarity for the poor, the abandoned, those we forget when the earth shakes when the wind hits and uproot our lives orderly. You will not forget anytime soon.
Marc Dugain interested in troubled periods of history. Already with House Officers , masterful hymn to life, he opened our eyes to humanity fierce broken faces of the Great War. Since then, he continues to auscultate the wounds of history, these moments of convulsion that immerses the individual in his courage when facing dilemmas its the most childish terrors. With Insomnia stars , 
he takes us in 1945, Germany. While a girl is starving, holed up in his father's farm sent to the Russian front, and became the involuntary witness of a murder, a small French garrison was sent to a town without history, in order to reduce the order of the winners in the footsteps of the Allied armies. At its head was a captain too human for the army. In civilian life, Captain Louyre was an astronomer. This means he can observe the almost imperceptible. And while his men are bored enough to die in this town full of losers from withdrawn and hostile, he wondered. Detected in the atmosphere something heavy, scary. A knot of lies, concealment concerted. He will not rest until this secret drill that thickens the air around him. In this novel with touches of the police investigation, where the tension rises as the investigation progresses, the camera and stripped decor, served by a clear writing, highlight the density of the feelings, the opacity of consciousness purchased, while pulsing the little flame of Captain Louyre, which claims itself to illuminate the abyss, on behalf of the dignity of man. A beautiful novel.
"- Looking for a truth?
Louyre sprang at once to signify the end of the interview.
- No truth in the philosophical sense of the term, I'm much more modest than that I am seeking to solve the riddle of murder.
The doctor laughed.
- A murder in a war that claimed millions of lives?
- Exactly, everyone has the right respect and a bit of truth, even if he is drowning in a sea of blood. "
You know Mathias Enard from his novel-UFO Zone. In Tell them about battles, kings and elephants , 
the novelist gives us a different partition. This novel set with short chapters like so many gems brings us back to poetry, his singular way, summarized and subtle understanding of the world. It is a mesmerizing novel takes us through a change inspired by a fact of history: May 13, 1506, fleeing the wrath of Julius II, Pope warrior and deadbeat who does hunt for abandoning the construction of his tomb Roman Michelangelo accepted the invitation of Sultan Bajazet (Bayazid). He embarked for Constantinople in order to build a bridge between East and West, between Old Town and the suburb of Pera. A bridge across the Bosphorus, spanning the Golden Horn. A bridge that would be both a work of art and political act. This immersion in a foreign land as fascinating and could only feed an artist of the caliber of Michelangelo. The move, move him. Raise doubts, too, sculptor steeped in pride and sure of his talent. Golds from Hagia Sophia to spell nights in the taverns of Pera, Michelangelo confuse, lost and found. Seduced by the Byzantine civilization, by the Ottomans, these "masters of light" he lets himself through the beauty while taking shape, as in Rome, as everywhere, a confrontation with the monarch. As if life was just beginning, as if the Caesars, where they are enthroned, could not love the artist only if they humble themselves before them.
"In recrossing the Golden Horn, Michelangelo's vision of its bridge, floating in the morning sun, so true that he has tears in his eyes. The building will be huge without imposing fine and powerful. As if the evening had unsealed lids and sent his certainty, drawing it finally appears.
He returned almost running to ask this idea on paper, pen strokes, shading to white with red highlights. Sprung from a bridge at night, steeped in the material of the city. "
Through this journey between East and West, between the rocking past civilizations mingled and uncertainty of this, is the portrait of an artist capable of capturing the beauty wherever it lies wild in the struggle for independence and relentless in his hatred, but also a lonely man terrified of the emotion that puts him in danger.
"Maybe you're right. Perhaps the best of childhood is this stubborn rage that makes us break the wooden castle if not perfect, according to our desires. Perhaps your genius blinds there. I'm nothing next to you, for sure. You make me tremble. I feel the dark force that will destroy everything in its path, destroying everything in its certainties. "
Remember, there was more than four years. Wedding cake , 
the first novel by Blandine Le Callet, has become a delightful surprise, bittersweet confection with a scalpel and look at a marriage collar-mounted. With embedded in the custard, this peak arsenic for flavor. Now she returns this summer with "The walk Lila K", a novel radically different. We are in a near future in a society that could be the future of our own: ultra safe and cozy, governed by a benevolent tyranny which means you still care for you, fliquer your every move, your inner turmoil, you force them to eat well, to make love on set dates, erase everything outside, and make you an individual smooth, obedient, operational, never depressed, issued the doubt. Hell is paved with good intentions, it is known. Admission in this world, Lila begins with a scene of incredible brutality. It is hard for her mother, one takes her mother in handcuffs. Howling, suffering. Then silence. We installed the child in the center, which takes place hybrid of the reformatory, hospital and school. It is a cry back in the groove. But being a gifted little girl, she'll learn to pretend. To provide proof of normality, obedience. His goal, escape, find her mother, and with it the memory of his early years of his childhood. On her way, she encounters a few characters more or less benevolent: an unconventional teacher, an obedient cog in the system, a library director, a warehouse full of scars ... Chilling odyssey which reflected the excesses of our time, gasping novel, deeply moving story of love, Lila K The walk is all that and more. And given the outcome, I can only applaud the courage of a novelist who did not hesitate, when his second novel, to take the risk to explore an area so different from the world of his first novel. A success.
"I kept my eyes tightly closed, not to distract me. There are moments need to know to enter without asking any questions. Tighten its Luckily, when present even more than expected, to embrace all his strength. "
The rest of my favorite heart to the next post. Until then, happy reading and see you soon!
Gaëlle Nohant
