Rose-Marie Pagnard, the kidnapper and “Madame Fiction” – Libération

A trip to magical and disturbing Lithuania in “The Abduction of Sarah Popp” by the French-speaking author.

Sarah Popp, 59, is a novelist and French writer. Note that she was, however, 20 years old in 1963, like Rose-Marie Pagnard. At the end of a literary festival in Vilnius in Lithuania, she is surrounded by snow: there is no longer a plane to Basel where her pianist husband, Tobie, who is also “part-time cook at a private school”. Couldn't she take advantage of this immaculate parenthesis to fly away in a different way? Taking unknown buses, wondering “how do you say in Lithuanian I'm looking for the hotel with no name?”, finally finding it and ignoring it “in one of the twelve elevators” of it before the receptionist presses in its place “on one of the thousand buttons surrounded by Cyrillic characters” ?

There is somethingAlice in Wonderland at the beginning of this Kidnapping of Sarah Popp, but with the very particular poetry of Rose-Marie Pagnard, a kind of magical realism where the world is porous, sensations becoming concepts and vice versa, time turning on itself. And above all, systematic false connections between chapters with intriguing titles (“Conversation with a Pony”, “Make a paper airplane”), which jump like a peeled film of cinema. “These pages contain things that I don’t always understand, although I feel part of them” <