French Novel
:
Angry Girl on a Stone Bench
, by Véronique Ovaldé
Aïda joins her sisters on an island off the coast of Palermo when their father dies.
Aïda had distanced herself from this family shattered by a mysterious tragedy.
Between pain and guilt, she wants to face those who banished her.
Between past and present, with humor and intensity, with an incisive pen, Véronique Ovaldé, with her talent as a storyteller, auscultates human passions, paints the portrait of a tormented family from the South and that of Aïda, a heroine passionate about quest for truth.
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Editions Flammarion, 320 p., 21 € Flammarion
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of Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux, excerpt
Foreign Novel
:
Intimacies
of Katie Kitamura
The narrator of Katie Kitamura observes the world without lying to herself.
She lives alone in The Hague, interpreting at the "court", which the reader can imagine to be the International Criminal Court, where war criminals are tried.
Her best friend lives in a disreputable neighborhood in the process of gentrification, her lover turns out to be married and the father of two children.
She attends the trial of a former president, the accused is attractive.
Everything is said with precision, his language is never fooled.
His power lies there, in his lucidity, to observe a world that is not.
Stock editions, 250 pages, €20.90.
Translated by Celine Leroy.
Stock Editions
Bio/story:
Believe
-
On the powers of literature
by Justine Augier
Justine Augier rereads the books recommended by her mother, the politician Marielle de Sarnez, those which, as a teenager, allowed her to detach herself from her, then to find her again.
They were not on the same political side, knew how to converse, sometimes argue, books were the means of this exchange.
When she told her mother about her project to write about the power of literature, she was already very ill.
But when Marielle de Sarnez was seduced by an idea, “she gave the impression of an almost magical presence at your side”.
A heroine is never alone, and Justine Augier recognizes here, in a magnificent way, her debt to books, and especially to her mother.
Editions Actes Sud, 144 p., €18.
Editions Actes Sud
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Comics/graphic novel
:
Marilyn Monroe, Unfinished Confession
by Stéphanie Sphyras and Sandrine Revel
Marilyn Monroe is 28 years old when she begins to confide in her friend, screenwriter Ben Hecht, for an autobiography.
She tells him about her childhood, her marriage, her beginnings as an actress, the path that led her from Norma Jean to Marilyn.
The project will remain unfinished, but these lucid and fascinating "confessions" will be well published – they have just been republished by Laffont – and inspired Stéphanie Sphyras for the words and Sandrine Revel for the drawing, a graphic novel of an elegance reminiscent of the admirable Glenn Gould, une vie à contretemps, by the same Sandrine Revel.
Editions Robert Laffont, 168 p., €24.
Editions Robert Laffont
