[Livre] Like a duty to remember

Sometimes, life throws a test our way that transforms us and calls into question our certainties. Finding yourself, a young French woman with no history, in a women's prison in Tunisia: that's an example.

In this autobiographical story but with perhaps romanticized memories assumed, the author plunges us into the deep end without preliminaries. We immediately find ourselves immersed in this unknown world, without knowing its ins and outs, like her the codes, the language, the tomorrow. We feel the life slipping away from her like the sand in the hand, the freedom she is losing.

The writing accentuates this feeling and puts us in tune with the narrator's impressions and emotions: short sentences that follow one another, colorful language, snapshots of life scenes with unvarnished details.

To survive, you have to adapt and little by little she will integrate into this new reality and discover its hidden, sometimes luminous side.

His copy of Contemplations by Victor Hugo is the rare link which connects her to the outside world, to the world before, and which, beyond an escape through the mind, allows her, as on a palimpsest, to engrave everyday life in order to 'anchor something that goes beyond it.

The Contemplated by Pauline Hillier. Editions La Manufacture de Livres, 180 pages, 18.90 euros.