Want to read? These new books selected by our journalist, Nicky Depasse; will keep you in suspense.
Did you devour all the books you received for Christmas? It’s time to take a trip to the bookstore! Here are the latest nuggets unearthed by our literary journalist.
Favorite books
Fragments of the Heart
This is an atypical and fascinating book which, by telling a love story in four seasons, reconciles the novel with poetry. A light series of short texts which tell of the burning of loving hearts, the color of sad days and, above all, how stars are born. Like a member of a club of deceased poets (her Poetry Club really exists), Marion Fritsch puts into form this art that we all cultivate: believing in the poetry that is hidden in every moment of our lives. And find it so that it takes on colors, in the absence of meaning. There is so much to experience, read and write.
Fragments of the Heart, Marion Fritsch, 234 p., ed. Albin Michel.
Woodworm
There is, in a village in Castile, a house animated by a life of its own whose current occupants, a young woman and her grandmother, do not know if it has always been like this or if it is the pact concluded by their ancestor to make disappear a violent husband who breathed a soul into his bricks. Since then, the women of this family have endured the curse of a house in which no man can survive for long and where specters go from the bed to the wardrobe, slamming the doors. A feminist story à la Stephen King, but also a fable about the rich and the poor, an unfathomable well of literary subjects.
Carcoma, Layla Martinez, 155 pp., ed. of Seoul.
-I love you
The large format of this work on Love, remarkably produced, like the incunabula of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, has everything to fit into the libraries which offer them to the gaze of privileged visitors. Richly illustrated and intelligently enhanced with famous quotes, the chapters with eloquent titles, written by Jean Cocteau’s great niece, speak of budding love, seduction, dreams, desire and promises. And then, at the end of passion, there is sharing, memories, oaths, in short, eternity. An art book in the image of love: a masterpiece of a life.
I love you, Dominique Marny, 312 p., ed. of the Holy Fathers.
Comic of the month
Even if we have read Elena Ferrante’s resoundingly successful books and even if we have seen the magnificent series that was based on them, the enchantment persists when discovering this comic book adaptation. The story of close friendship between Lila and Lenù in the Neapolitan poverty of the 50s and 60s is as moving as it is universal. The pastel colors and the narrative discoveries make this graphic novel, in every sense of the word, a wonderful and poetic illustration of the infinite cycle of these little girls walking the path that will make them women.
The Prodigious Friend, Volume 1, Elena Ferrante, Chiara Lagani and Mara Cerri, 254 p., ed. Delcourt/Mirages.
