“Constellucination” by Louise Bentkowski, read by Ivet Blanc-Benoît, professor of literature – Libération

Every week, a reader reviews a favorite. Today “little bits of the world” gleaned.

What to do with the name that we inherit despite ourselves when we are born and which links us to the dead and family curses, but also to the living to come, like this «iel» to the floating type, this “great-great-great little one. child” at the other end of the future? The narrator, like the author, bears that of Bentkowski, toponym of an Indus valley where his ancestors, through successive exiles leading them from Poland to France, were forced to settle down one day. She chooses to make constellations of stories, stitched together in the etymological sense of the term in «rhapsodies»which hallucinate according to the magnificent neologism of its title: Constellucination. Par “naive analogies”over the course of eighteen songs of what is at the same time a story, an essay, and a long prose poem, with sensitive grace and gentle fantasy, she succeeds in “sew the little pieces of the world gleaned from this large patchwork” stories connected to other stories. Those of his family, but also those of Greek myths, Inuit tales and Aztec legends.

Heart-shaped potato rejected because not calibrated

There we meet uncle Victor, who died in Dachau at the age of 24, without having been able to finish the last sentence in his notebook, grandfather Juliusz, forced by the French civil status to be