With “all the nuances of the night”, the English author signs a criminal odyssey where purity and vice confront each other. A novel of dazzling darkness.
In this year 1975, the small community of Monta Clare, in Missouri, was in turmoil. Patch, the borne kid who takes himself for a pirate, disappeared after having intervened between the pretty Mitch – daughter of a good family with whom he is secretly in love – and the hooded man who was trying to remove it. While the months go by without being found, Saint, his only real friend, ends up finding the isolated hut in which the child is chained. But, during the police intervention, the kidnapper escapes. What has Patch suffered during these long weeks when he was locked up? Claims to him to have her salvation only in the voice of Grace, a teenager detained at the same time as him … of which we have no trace. He made her the oath he saves her in case he would go back to it. Her quest to find her will last more than twenty-five years. And transform the fate of all those who rub shoulders with it.
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Impossible to let go of this extraordinary book of 800 pages, where poetry, delicacy and feelings on edge counterbalance the darkness of the darkness which permeates the story. While so many children are volatilizing themselves, and Patch the vigilante turns over time as an artist and banks, one wonders, as a Saint become a policewoman, if this grace that he seeks with so much obstinacy would not be an imaginary friend. By meeting Chris Whitaker, we suspect that such intense history can only draw its source from intimate injuries.
“My life has changed at 19”
“My life changed at 19, when I got stabbed several times by a guy who wanted to steal my phone,” he confirms. After this attack, I suffered from a post-traumatic stress syndrome, but I did not want to talk about it or go to a shrink. So I started drinking and drowling, until the day I borrowed from the library a work called ‘Therapeutic writing’. He advocated to sleep on paper the traumatic experience and transform it through fictitious characters to change the outcome. We also had to modify the place and choose the last place where we had been happy … “
For him, America, since his father had taken him to Disney world. Apérée de Brève Félicité where the Londonian therefore located each of his five novels (only two are translated into French), who all have the heroes of the kids who have undergone a trauma. And who will have to learn to overcome it to put their existence back on good rails.
“It’s my best novel. There is not a word that I could have removed ”
His own journey, before the terrible assault, had already been strewn with pitfalls. “My mother’s companion broke my arm when I was a child … Then I messed all my schooling. Suddenly, I entered professional life without any diploma. Whitaker chains the odd jobs and becomes a trader at the City. But, after ten years in finance, he only managed to multiply the debts. To the point of having to reimburse … 1 million sterling pounds! Fortunately, to fill the deficit, he discovers a literary treasure at his fingertips.
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Today, the success of “all the nuances of the night” makes him travel the whole world. A masterpiece unanimously acclaimed, which will soon become a series produced by Universal, an adaptation with which it is closely associated. “I incorporated a number of narrative threads that I had dismissed,” said Whitaker, otherwise my book would have been twice thicker … But I’m satisfied, I think it’s the best novel I have ever written, there is no word that I could have removed from the final version. After that, nothing will scare me anymore! »Word of the most intrepid, and exciting, of the authors.
“All the nuances of the night”, from Chris Whitaker, ed. Sonatine, 816 pages, 25.90 euros.
© em. Sonatinen’s
