We knew the Nantes of Julien Gracq (the shape of a city) and the Brest of Louis Le Guilloux (Brest, Mist and Fire), here is the Saint-Nazaire of Patrick Deville, way of emphasizing that the Great West and everything Particularly the big Breton cities inspire writers highly. The author of “plague & cholera”-who evoked the life of Alexandre Yersin, the discoverer of the diphteric toxin, and his stays of this one in Indochina-narrates here all the magic of his entire birthplace turned towards the wide. “” Sea portshe writes, attract writers like the lighthouse calls to him the storm ”. The shipyards where the Normandiethe France or the Queen Mary 2the immense underwater base, the old Lazaret de Mindin, its land of childhood ,, on the other side of the estuary, the bridge in S suspended at sixty meters above the waves, the distant expeditions Towards Saigon and Hanoi, the stopovers in Nha Trang or Hué, not far from Da Lat dear in Yersin: that requires our Nazairian grabbing with obvious maritime nostalgia. Like a beautiful tribute to its floating roots.
Saint-Nazaire is a novel without fiction, by Patrick Deville (Seuil, 156 pages, € 17).
