Romans
Sarah Jollien-Fardel, the Long
Sabine Wespieser Editor, 160 pp., €18 (ebook: €13.99).
We understand this very quickly: the narrator Rose finds herself locked in a wooded room attached to a tether. For what ? You have to listen to the story of this woman, the obvious meeting with her lover Camil at the age of 6, their reunion in Lausanne many years later, the unexpected birth of their daughter Anna and the drama that will bring her to the ground. As in his beautiful first novel, Her Favorite, Swiss writer Sarah Jollien-Fardel sets a story in the mountains of Valais, with its rustic decor and family tributaries. The beloved and strong grandmother runs the café with the father, the mother, who often had “the animals”, dies, the brother moves away. Rose reconstructs, from her strange captivity, and with tender affection, a blessed, sometimes painful universe. The author manages to overturn the idea we can have of violence and cruelty, and like a good bookseller, imagines a soothing character who reads through doors. F.Rl
Letter
Claude Simon, “My work as a writer does not allow any concessions in my eyes.” Letter to Federico Mayor
Presentation by Mireille Calle-Gruber. Les éditions du Chemin de fer, 32 pp., €11.
Nobel Prize winner in 1985, Claude Simon went to the USSR the following year at the invitation of the Kyrgyz writer Tchinguiz Aïtmatov, close to Gorbachev, for an international forum intended to reflect “to the goals of humanity in the third millennium on a global scale”. Among the participants, James Baldwin, Yachar Kemal, Arthur Miller, the photographer Inge Morath, the actor Peter Ustinov and the future director general of UNESCO, the biologist Federico Mayor. The Issyk-Kul Forum, so named because it took place on the shores of Lake Issyk in Kyrgyzstan, proved so disappointing that Claude Simon refused to sign the final declaration, accused of “puerility”, of “hollow emphasis”, and published the novel in 1988 l’Invitation (Midnight), a devastating satire. Meanwhile, in November 1986, Federico Mayor sent an amended French version which Claude Simon returned signed, and accompanied by a letter reproduced here for the first time. He expresses his faith in creation. “I expected the question to be asked and discussed: ‘What is art? What are its function, its status in society, its powers, what role can it play in the fight against “obscurantism, tyranny and exploitation”? these terms appearing in the forum’s declaration of intent. He takes the opportunity to discuss his situation «marginal» : “I am almost unanimously rejected in my own country.” Cl.D.
History
Daniel Cordier, Retro-chaos. Memoirs
Gallimard “Witnesses”, 370 pp., €22 (ebook: €15.99).
That they appreciated the historical works of Daniel Cordier (starting with the Catacomb Republic) or looked at his autobiographies (Alias Caracalla above all), readers familiar with the special itinerary of Jean Moulin’s former secretary will be able to move on. For others, his Memoirs will offer a lively account of a man who experienced three lives. That of a free Frenchman burning to fight who, for lack of a military assignment, agrees to be parachuted to head the secretariat of General de Gaulle’s delegate and witnesses from the front row the founding of the National Council of the Resistance; that of a neophyte who, supremely contemptuous of contemporary art, becomes a painting dealer and Dubuffet’s agent – not without clashes with this painter with a rough character; that of an actor in the Resistance who, repulsed by the attacks made against Jean Moulin by Henri Frenay, the leader of the Combat movement, turns into a historian to defend his former boss with the weapons of science. A magnificent testimony to a commitment placed under the sign of ardor and passion. OW
-Psy
Isabelle Bedouet, Imposters. Landru, Petiot, Romand and others
Imago, 192 pp., 20 €.
If we took stock of all the “bad things” brought by the Internet and (a)social networks, we would cite the proliferation of scams, cheating, prevarication and other idiot traps. Anonymity, the fact of acting “at a distance”, without contact, the subtleties of digital technology and the expansion of credulity have helped a lot. Of course, usurpers, thieves and dupers have always existed: there is neither place nor time where individuals have not struggled to “taking on false identities, “shady” titles, and inventing stories with the aim of extracting “objects” from others, such as goods, power or even love”, or even pushed to the point of crime. Some have become famous, such as Landru, the “Bluebeard of Gambais”, Marcel Petiot, the man with a thousand faces, capable of finding his prey among those fleeing Nazi persecution, or the false doctor Jean-Claude Romand , which, “caught in the cycle of lies, will go so far as to commit a quintuple murder”. What are the personalities of these impostors? Are they psychosis? Is “perversion” enough to explain their abuses? Psychotherapist – we already owe him The Crime of the Papin Sisters (Imago, 2016) -, Isabelle Bedouet analyzes here the social, intellectual, emotional and psychological trajectory of seven impostors (Landru, Petiot, Romand, Léa Papin, Paul Grappe, “the transvestite of the Roaring Twenties”, Gilbert Bourdin, the “divine renovator of the world”, and the anonymous Gabriel, “half-angel, half-demon”), visit the “dark backstage” of their existences, and discovers there “unsuspected, enigmatic universes, each more surprising than the other”. R.M.
Philosophy
Flora Bastiani, Philosophy of critical care
The Hermeneutic Circle, 258 pp., €23.
The subtitle explicitly states the purpose of the book: “Thinking about the relationship in intensive care, intensive care and organ harvesting”. And this object is obviously as complex as it is precious, because it is a question of saying what a human being is, what a person is, what a subject is – at the very moment when, in irremissible illness, the artificial coma, sedation, proximity to death, we find ourselves “neat” and where the characteristics that define life and existence seem to disappear. Philosopher, lecturer at Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University, member of the office of the Hospital Ethics Committee of Toulouse University Hospital, specialist in the thoughts of Levinas and Maldiney, Flora Bastiani, in this work located between “documentary and theoretical analysis” (which includes four interviews with nurses from different health services, intensive care, traumatology, intensive care, etc.), offers to enter “in the healthcare universe with a philosophical look”, by continuing to develop a “microphilosophy of relationships”, centered on theact of care, on the theorization of such a systematic, epistemological act, from which a “nursing science”, and “knowledge specific to care”, distinct from medical knowledge. What is “the caregiver brings out, through his act of care” ? By building a “intermediate sphere” where others can “come and take shelter”,make their place there, “caregivers create a welcome, a whole, enveloping suffering, not to alleviate it, but to allow existence not to resolve itself”. R.M.
