Adelheid Duvanel, the minimal instinct – Libération

Adelheid Duvanel, the minimal instinct – Libération
Adelheid Duvanel, the minimal instinct – Libération

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Publication of “Histoires de vent” by the Swiss author born in 1936 who committed suicide in 1996, a collection of very short texts where the strangeness of everyday life and a sort of unfinished anthropomorphism reign.

Here is the first paragraph of the first text (“the Poet”) of the first collection (Wind stories) by Adelheid Duvanel (Switzerland who died in 1996): “A few months ago, I was trying to be sociable. I attracted strangers to my house; the wine sparkled like blood flowers in the glasses I handed them. In the early morning, the eyes of young women and young men became empty, running drop by drop, warmly, down their necks, skipping over their collarbones and streaming down. But I, who hadn’t drunk, sat like cellophane in the threadbare armchair next to the central heating and watched their dances; they detached themselves from the walls to which they had clung, and floated like ivy in the wind.” The second paragraph begins like this: “As a child, I tried to make contact with people using small gestures, by expressing myself in half-hearted words, but they liked sound, concrete things, which I hated. They couldn’t understand me.” Later in the text, the narrator describes enjoying walking with his dog. “It was during one of these walks that I became a poet”passing in front of a frozen car on which a child traces letters with a finger. “Something was written on the hood, a word that piqued my interest; passing close by, I deciphered: ANGER.”

So published by Corti Wind storieschronologically

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