With “Tombée du ciel”, Alice Develey takes a moving dive into the twists and turns of anorexia. A powerful and autobiographical novel about this “disease of emptiness” which destroys adolescence.
The literary selection of Sarah Lambot :
– “Fallen from the sky” by Alice Develey | Éditions de l’Iconoclaste, August 2024
Interned in a hospital, Alice, 14, discovers this world made of white coats and insomniac nights. Between these walls where she undergoes revolting treatment, she meets other girls like her and begins writing their tiny lives in a notebook. Writing becomes a way to resist.
You will notice that Alice is both the first name of the narrator and the author: a coincidence? Really, because it is an autobiographical story.
In this atypical, powerful, moving first novel, Alice Develey lifts the veil on anorexia, this “disease of emptiness” that she experienced from the inside.
It tells of the loneliness, the incomprehension and the awkwardness of the family in the face of this illness of which they understand nothing, the confinement, the fraternal bonds between the sick, but also the envy, the rivalry, and many other feelings Again.
You have to read it to try to catch a glimpse of this inner suffering which affects adolescent girls (because they are most often girls, women) in the prime of their lives. To lighten up until we disappear, to wish only to die at the age when life burns within us, at the age where everything should begin: an unbearable reality but which exists, and about which it is in the public interest to address open your eyes.
The author explains that it took only a month to write this novel which had been waiting for her for sixteen years. With “Tombée du ciel”, Alice Develey knows that she will arouse indignation but also identification. A dazzling shock story, served by an incandescent pen, to discover.
– “Own” by Alia Trabucco Zerán | Robert Laffont, August 2024 for the French version
This is how the novel opens: “My name is Estela, can you hear me? Es-te-la Gar-cí-a”. Who is this Estela who is trying to make her voice heard with difficulty? A voice that is silenced most of the time. A voice that is part of the furniture. The voice of an invisible person, since she is the domestic worker of a rich family in Santiago.
A family which, beneath the impeccable veneer of appearances, hides a number of secrets but above all a tragedy whose content we quickly learn: the death of the couple’s little girl.
It is through the voice of Estela, a marginalized voice, which carries so little weight, that the reader will learn how the tragedy happened. A powerful, authentic, acid voice. Which brings us to the roots of evil and makes us discover behind the scenes: the low blows and the horrors of a society fractured by relationships of domination and money, where some live in the shadow of others.
The cruelty and contempt that are passed down as a legacy, the inevitable and fatal enslavement of the less fortunate to the powerful, the two-speed society, the body as a work tool and behind it, dehumanization.
A story that is difficult, if not impossible, to put down once you grasp it: breathtaking, psychological, distressing, relentless, “Proper” will not leave you unscathed. This week he received the Fémina Prize for best foreign novel.
