Guest of the Vannes bookstore Le Silence de la mer, Wednesday November 6, Lucie Taiëb fascinated the audience by presenting her new book “The interior sea, in search of an erased landscape”, published by Flammarion. Novelist, translator, but also poet, the German writer is also a lecturer at the University of Western Brittany (UBO). After a first notable documentary story on Freshkills, one of the largest open-air landfills, off the coast of New York – today transformed into a leisure park -, the author, always concerned by ecology and living things, questions the identity of a place again in his latest work.
A story from the former GDR
This time, his story is anchored in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), near the Polish border, where the inhabitants of a village enter into resistance in order not to abandon their living space destined to be razed for the benefit of a future mining site. What is struggle? How to define the notion of justice? Is there a form of indecency in surviving the loss of the irreplaceable? So many questions raised by Lucie Taïeb’s story divided into brief chapters.
“I don’t do journalistic work,” defends the author. “My book is an investigation which combines elements of personal resonance. I lost my mother at 18 and this mourning broke into the text,” she continues.
Through erratic policies led by the GDR, then Germany, the struggle of the inhabitants will ultimately end in defeat and loss. Today in a new cloned village, built identically, the inhabitants try to register the presence of what has been lost, while the children, ignorant of the past, construct new memories. “The opportunity to reflect on this capacity we have to re-attach ourselves,” concludes Lucie Taïeb.
Practical
“The Inland Sea, in search of an erased territory”, by Lucie Taiëb, published by Flammarion, Terra Incognita collection. Prices: €21.
France
Books
