Exiled to Palermo, Aïda decides to return to the island she left years earlier.
His father has just died.
He has always held her responsible for the disappearance of his youngest sister, one carnival evening... With
Angry Girl on a Stone Bench,
Véronique Ovaldé examines a family cell with a meticulousness as laughing as it is cruel to tell us about violence, of death and love.
She signs a superb novel with a scintillating sentence combining hardness with candor and lucidity with faith in the other, despite everything.
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Miss Figaro. – The starting point of the novel seems to be drawn from a news item: the disappearance of a child…
Véronique Ovaldé.–
Many books are built around a disappearance, it's an invitation to romance, a possibility that opens up.
There, we can say that we have a classic family, with a taciturn, somewhat tyrannical father, a mother who seems submissive, and four daughters.
In a country, southern Italy, where “having four daughters means not having children”… The preamble to the plot is about a little girl, Mimi, whose fate is unknown.
All human beings have once wondered if they could disappear, leave everything behind and start over: it's an eternal fantasy.
Except that there, we are not in the fantasy.
A child disappears and her family is left stunned.
It's a book about memory, inheritance, family and how to cope with it
Veronique Ovalde
Did you have the desire to study family dynamics, and more particularly sororal ones?
Yes, among others.
I've always been bothered by the fact that there was no other word than siblings… “Sorority” doesn't have the same meaning.
"Sororie", perhaps?
Still, I'm very struck by the interest shown in children who are beautiful.
I almost called the book
The Immemorial Chagrin of girls who are neither guys, nor pretty, nor interesting.
How do they do, those who make up the majority of girls?
Well, they do what they can.
They get by and can become monsters… But it's also a book about memory, heritage, family and how to get by.
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You borrow from Greek tragedy, from the opera, but the narrator uses a tone where irony mixes with tenderness, and vice versa...
Perhaps it is present from these words,
Girl angry on a bench Pierre.
It's been a long time since I wanted a title like a tableau cartel.
There, Aïda, I see her, on her bench, with her rage suppressed.
And of course, that's when another character falls in love with it… This mixture of despair, detachment and humor reflects my temperament.
To my way of living the life given to us.
This is what I say to conclude: "All this will of course have an end that I will not tell here, I already know it, you too, since nothing can prevent it, and since knowing it is our privilege and curse to all."
We live our existence by being constantly torn between the temptation of "what's the point?"
and the consciousness of benefiting from the immense favor of living.
By writing and reading, I try to come to terms with our perishable nature.
We are animals with stories, I believe that deeply.
That's what differentiates us from nutria and hamsters, isn't it?
"
Angry girl on a stone bench
"
, by Véronique Ovaldé, Éditions Flammarion, 304 p., €21.
flammarion