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A young Italian tightrope walker, the Lutetia hotel upon the return of deportees, the existential crisis of a start-up, a literary double, pangolins and “hotel rats”, a philosopher son of a gravel dredger, and deities, who mock mortals.
Romans
Jérémie Guez, the balance of bodies
Seuil, 336 pp., €21.
To read the balance of bodies, It’s better not to be afraid of heights. Ciro, a young Italian worker in the Parisian suburbs of the 1970s, swings over the void with ease and impresses his workmates. The orphan is taken in by one of them, Marcelo Zaccariello, and finally obtains a name by joining his family. The father praises this adopted son to the skies and completely abandons his daughter, Chiara, a brilliant student dreaming of social advancement. Marcelo charges Ciro with monitoring Chiara who is suffocating under this patriarchal reign. But Ciro and Chiara fall in love, “they who were not of the same blood but of the same misery”. Sexism, emancipation and thwarted love mix easily in this sixth novel by Jérémie Guez. A gripping story in which bodies meet and damage each other but also manage to heal. M. Si
David Hurry, No news since Drancy
Editions Riveneuve, 353 pp, €22.
The heroine of this family saga is named Andrée, the author's grandmother. One day in 1930, this young Norman woman married Maurice, a non-practicing Jew, born into a French family who had been secular since the Revolution. In 1940, Andrée and Maurice fled Paris with their parents and children to reach the countryside far from the Germans, keeping a low profile. But in 1943, based on an anonymous denunciation, the Gestapo came to look for Maurice and his parents. For Andrée it is a cataclysm. She will try to put up a front and wait for him. But, in 1945, she went to the Lutetia hotel every time she returned from depot.
France
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