For her, and it’s even more true with this new book, we always need mysteries: “You have stifled magic, the spiritual and contemplation in the din of your cities, and few, taking the time to listen, can still hear the whisper of ancient times or the sound of the wind in the branches. But you’re still shaking without even knowing why.”
“From the Domain of Murmurs” by Carole Martinez
The title of his new novel Sleep your brute sleep is taken from a poem of Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire entitled The Taste of Nothingness. And, in fact, with this tale for older children, Carole Martinez takes us to the edge of the nothingness of the human world, in a warning that nature tries to give, via children’s dreams, to the inhabitants who are destroying it.
The Phenomenon
Eva is a neurologist and sleep specialist. She experiences a deep love with her daughter Lucie, whose dreams she scrutinizes. Pierre, her husband, becomes violent towards Lucie to the point of forcing Eva and Lucie to flee to a corner of the Camargue, near marshes, frogs and geese. They have chosen solitude, but there they meet Serge, a “good giant” who lives there, alone, tortured by a terrible tragedy for which he feels guilty.
gullMothers can no longer stand the smell of their babies!
The novel is punctuated by ten children’s dreams, in which they can fly, fall, become animals. One of these comes from Caroline, who lives in Waterloo, and her dream is inhabited by the mass grave of the battle.
The first dream causes Lucie and all the children in the world to let out a long, frightening howl. The “Phenomenon”, as it has been called, spreads throughout the Earth at the speed of our planet’s rotation and then stops just as abruptly.
The alert is general, the incomprehension too: what is happening? Especially since other dreams and increasingly worrying phenomena arise: one night, all the children get up insomniac and go towards the water to jump in. Another night, the dream brings about a terrible storm and a shower of hailstones threatening to bring down the planes in flight.
Nature seems to respond to children’s dreams. If the novel is dreamlike, Carole Martinez mixes in interesting scientific reflections on sleep and dreams, as well as on the ecological state of our planet.
The ten plagues
Little by little we understand that the Phenomenon follows the biblical story from the ten plagues of Egypt to the final two, where humanity was plunged into darkness and all the firstborn died. God had inflicted these ten plagues to force Pharaoh to free the Hebrew people held in slavery and show them his omnipotence. In this novel, nature also shows its power and sends us a warning.
The Leaning Earth by Carole Martinez
Even if we have to accept this choice of nightmare dreams and the novel is not without length, Carole Martinez maintains the suspense well: how can we stop the child whose dreams are at the start of the Phenomenon? Is it Lucie who is “The dream door”? What does nature want to teach us through children?
Sleep your brute sleep once again demonstrates her talent as a fantastic storyteller, evolving on the border of reality, between ecological fable and prophetic story.
⇒ Sleep your brute sleep | Novel | Carole Martinez | Gallimard, 398 pp. €22, digital €15
EXTRACT
“If the mad child produces a new wave, millions of people will die of hunger, the locusts that his dream will inflict on us will destroy our fields, the darkness will lead us astray, then will come the death of children, of all children , and if it is enough to prevent just one of them from dreaming to stop the scourges, I do not understand why the authorities do not look for him, do not find him, do not condemn him, although he is a child. .”
