A teenage girl refuses to dive into a swimming pool.
She is described with the precision of a New Roman published by Éditions de Minuit, but as the book is at Gallimard, the diver is as paranoid as in a "microfiction" by Régis Jauffret.
Léa Tourret is very skilled at creating a climate of stress in a municipal pool full of chlorine and bathing caps.
The sentence that convinced me to talk about it here is on page 14:
"And it stinks of Club Med, the delicious cocktails drunk straight from the fruit, the straws planted directly in the brains of coconuts, just because a half-roasted lady smears monoi next to me.”
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Discover the “Best of the Goncourt Prize” collection
We ask nothing more of a first novel than to offer a new ability to look, here both dry and wet.
David Hockney has painted many blue rectangles where handsome Californian kids dive.
In the sentence above, Léa Tourret has condensed the daiquiris, suntan oil, summer anxiety and the pressure of obligatory happiness...
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