the best new releases of November

Margaret Atwood, Philippe Forest, Cormac McCarthy… Our suggestions for books to slip into your pockets this week.

“Let's take a walk in the woods”, by Margaret Atwood

It's the story of a snail whose soul was reincarnated… in the body of a bank employee. Or, a few pages earlier, that of an octopus-shaped alien who babysits for a group of humans quarantined on his planet, “as part of an intergalactic crisis aid program”. We also savor, elsewhere, the wisdom and reinvented words of Hypatia of Alexandria (a monologue) and an imaginary interview with George Orwell by the author: “I so rarely have the opportunity to chat with someone who is still in their physical form”…Four years later The Wills (2019) and almost ten years after his last collection of short stories (Nine Tales, 2014), Canadian Margaret Atwood once again proves her genius for short stories, funny or poignant, as dense and unforgettable as her novels. — C.M.

Ed. 10/18, €9.20.

“Mars”, by Fritz Zorn

“I like to imagine that destiny, after seeing that I definitely didn't get along well with life, said to itself: My goodness, since it didn't want to work with living, let's see a bit of what it will be like to die…” writes the narrator of Mars in a fit of dark irony as he so often does, while, on paper, he lays down his Memoirs – as one tidies a room, before turning off the light and going out, closing the door behind oneself . Published in 1977, this autobiographical story in which the German-speaking Swiss writer Fritz Zorn (1944-1976) recounts his short life and the cancer from which he died at the age of 32 immediately established itself as a classic of those years. irrigated by the spirit of rebellion. — Na.C.

Ed. Folio, €9.40.

“Marilyn: light and shadow”, by Norma Rosten

What could be more normal than Norma and Norman liking each other? It was she who observed the similarity of their first names. No doubt because she had a good ear, and the slightest detail, linked to her childhood as Norma Jean Baker, made Marilyn tremble like a leaf. Leaves that were for her “like a miracle; a possible immortality was lodged in their seasonal death and rebirth,” notes Norman Rosten in this book, unstitched and hand-stitched. A work of reparation and homage, composed five years after the death of her close friend, and reissued today to great effect, it is so moving and singular. — M.L.

Ed. Points, €6.95.

“All accomplices!”, by Benoît Marchisio

Abel, 19, is a student forced to work to help his mother, who is struggling between two or three cleaning jobs. Rinsed by the hardships of casual employment, such as a waiter in a restaurant, Abel believes he has found the holy grail by becoming self-employed and “courier-partner” of a home meal delivery box, the App. He believes in it firmly and imagines entering the new economy, the one that is described to him as “liberated from archaisms and conservatisms”. So here it is, in a few clicks, “his own boss, master of his destiny”. Meticulously documented, Benoît Marchisio's novel is a chilling dive into everyday life, into the intimacy of their hopes, their gestures, their struggles, their suffering, of this new lumpenproletariat of the disruptive economy. All accomplices! is a terrific thriller of rare brutality. The ultra realistic noir novel of a world in distress dominated by the law of the strongest. — M.A.

Ed. Rivages Noir, €9.20.

“From language to language”, by Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Would translation be “the language of languages”? The language through which “all languages ​​can be spoken”, as analyzed by the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, campaigning for the plurality of African languages. This fruitful and hospitable idea is at the heart of the essay by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a Senegalese philosopher born in 1955, specialist in Islamic thought and professor at Columbia University, in New York. “In the work of translation, languages ​​know each other. From language to language”, he writes bluntly, but in the company of numerous references: Amanda Gorman, Cicero, Blaise Cendrars, Willard Van Orman Quine, Émile Benveniste and even Birago Diop, who translated the oral tales of the griot Amadou Koumba into writing. — J.Ce.

Ed. Albin Michel – Espace Libres, €7.90.

“I remain king of my sorrows”, by Philippe Forest

“All the stories in the world lie on the ground. They are not the property of anyone. Anyone can take it as they wish. He does what he wants with it. Without being accountable to anyone. Otherwise to himself. » , writes Philippe Forest on the threshold of I remain king of my sorrows. Winston Churchill is one of the two main actors. The one who responds to him is a painter, Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), officially commissioned in 1954 to paint the portrait of the Prime Minister, now weakened and ill – the painting must be given to him in the autumn, with great fanfare, during of a ceremony organized for his 80th birthday. Inspired perhaps by Rubens and the Baroque, certainly by Shakespeare, his specters and his spells, Philippe Forest gives the dialogue of the two men the form of a theatrical performance. A tragedy in four acts between which he intervenes, Prologue or Interlude, a tragic chorus in itself. — Na.C.

Ed. Folio, €8.30.

“Riding Alone”, by Kathryn Scanlan

Kathryn Scanlan's minimalist and rapid sentences – with their dry precision wonderfully transmitted by Laetitia Devaux's beautiful translation – are like the brushstrokes of a hyperrealist painter: they compose a hypnotic painting that destabilizes the most unshakeable certainties about distance between reality and its representation. It must appear, in a dialogue, in the middle of the narration of Ride alone, the first name of its heroine, Sonia, so that it comes to mind that this is not a testimony, an autobiographical and documentary story, but a novel. Sonia's novel, therefore, is nourished by the interviews that the American writer conducted with this woman, now in her sixties, passionate about horses and who devoted her life to them. — Na.C.

Ed. 10-18, €8.00.

“Our dear old lady author”, by Anne Serre

“Without cruelty there is no writer. Cruelty is our first virtue”, dreamily think the very strange “dear old lady author”, that Anne Serre chose as the heroine of her latest novel, at least as insane, unclassifiable and diabolically crafted as her fifteen previous ones. May reasonable readers renounce this crazy story where the characters endlessly cross paths with their authors and the authors of their authors, where the narrator escapes his traditional role of observer and director of the plot to join them without complexes and mix his own desires with theirs… A story as Pirandellian as it is Kafkaesque, under the auspices of Hölderlin as well as Ezra Pound, with a zest of absurd humor full of an aristocratic panache à la Raymond Roussel. — F.P.

Ed. Folio, €7.80.

“The Passenger”, by Cormac McCarthy

“The world must be at least half composed of darkness,” says one of the characters Passenger, testamentary novel by Cormac McCarthy. Darkness is widely discussed in The Passenger. There are those in which Robert Western, the central character of the book, a diver in opaque waters near New Orleans, lives day by day. “I dreamed that you were lounging in your weighted shoes at the bottom of the ocean. To search for God knows what in the darkness of these bathypelagic depths […] In my dream, I had the impression that you had discovered the entrance to hell, one of his friends said to Robert one day, alluding less to his job as a salvage diver than to the inner darkness in which he lives as a recluse, mourning his sister Alicia, who died ten years earlier. — Na.C.

Ed. Points, €10.80.

“As if we were ghosts”, by Philip Gray

In As if we were ghosts, by Philip Gray (for whom this is the first novel in his own name, even if he has published several under various pseudonyms), the reader thus follows the young Englishwoman Amy Vaneck, who left to investigate in 1919 on the Somme front to understand what happened to his missing companion. In the aftermath of the First World War, in the middle of landscapes disfigured and haunted by death, the young woman – whose determination is reminiscent of Mathilde fromA long engagement Sunday, by Sébastien Japrisot (1991) – will quickly discover that not all corpses are necessarily linked to combat… Unsurprisingly, world wars are another favored theme of English historical crime fiction. The detective genre then plays on the paradox between an era of chaos and the detective's search for truth. — Y. L.-S.

Ed. 10-18, €9.60.