Sleep like a brute by Carole Martinez: a dream too thick

From his first novel, The Stitched Heart (Gallimard, 2007), Carole Martinez laid the foundations of a universe that she has never left. A dreamlike world where history, the great one, intertwines with tale and magic. Childhood, learning about life, the tenacity of little girls, the destinies of heroic women have pride of place. Carole Martinez also depicts, with great delicacy, ambivalent male figures, neither completely dark nor ever totally reassuring. Violent? Yes, for some. We also find in his romantic journey healers and solitary characters, beings on the margins, imbued with an almost symbiotic link with nature, the most marvelous or frightening things it offers. As for occultism and religion, both themes flow naturally.

Sleep your brute sleepa title borrowed from a verse by Baudelaire, follows each step of this fantastic vein intertwined from book to book by Carole Martinez. A…