Claude Gauvard, Yara El-Ghadban, Elizabeth Strout…

Four novels, two dictionaries, a primer… Here are brief reviews of seven notable works in this forty-eighth week of the year.

Novel. “The Dance of the Flamingos”, by Yara El-Ghadban

Novelist, editor and anthropologist born in Dubai into a Palestinian refugee family, Yara El-Ghadban has lived in Montreal since 1989, where her third novel was published, The Flamingo Dance. This utopia opens, like a fable with apocalyptic overtones, with the spread of a strange “salt disease” around the Dead Sea. Indifferent to religions and passports, it hits workers, undocumented immigrants and tourists, Bedouins, Palestinians and Israelis. First engaged in saving the sick, the Israeli state relegates them behind the “separation wall” when the epidemic gets out of control. “So we in turn forgot the world. Its wars, its hatreds, its fears, its ugliness. We have forgotten the world, its maps, its roads, its borders. We substituted life for death”says Alef, “son of a Palestinian botanist and an Israeli rabbi”. Abandoned in nature destroyed by salt, fifty patients, including Alef's parents, survived thanks to the arrival of pink flamingos…

Yara El-Ghabdan signs a political and ecological tale. His poetic prose seduces with its desperate but necessary optimism. Alef's generation, ignorant of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, embodies both the unthinkable and the desirable: a rebirth, a second chance given to this land. Unreceptive to the speeches of elders, youth invent their own myths, as well as a new relationship with the living. Gl. It has.

History. “Notre-Dame de Paris”, by Claude Gauvard

In 128 pages of great clarity, Claude Gauvard achieves a tour de force: writing the total history of Notre-Dame de Paris, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The medievalist of course traces that of the construction of this Gothic jewel, paradoxically illuminated by the fire which almost destroyed it in 2019. And of its restoration in the 19th^e century, entrusted, as everyone knows, to Viollet-le-Duc. But it also reminds us that Notre-Dame was a powerful ecclesiastical institution. Its 51 canons were rich lords, who administered the Hôtel-Dieu and prosperous agricultural estates, while the Bishop of Paris was automatically part of the king's advisors in the Middle Ages. If this prelate has since lost this leading political role, the masses he celebrates in memory of the Presidents of the Republic recall the organic links which continue to unite Notre-Dame to the State and to France as a whole. My.

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