Louise Glück, Sarah Stern, Jaap Robben, Coco… – Liberation

A story of very different twins, an immersion in psychological care pathways, an essay on unfinished architecture and a reflection on trust.

Romans

Louise luck, Marigold and Rose, a story

Translated from English (United States) and afterword by Marie Olivier. Gallimard, 80 pp., €12 (ebook: €8.49)

Marigold and Rose are twins and very small (around a year old). Before they came into the world, their parents knew nothing about the twins: they “expected to have the same baby twice, like the same dish twice at a restaurant”, but their daughters are as different as night and day. “Everyone understood that Marigold lived in her head and Rose lived in the world.” When one learns to communicate, the other learns to observe. “She was an excellent observer.” If you look closely, Marigold is also an image of the writer, referred to the “dream language” according to the expression of the translator Marie Olivier in the afterword, “that which does not speak but is written, and which is the language of literature”. Always with this curious mixture of banality and magnitude (saying almost nothing, opening abysses of reflection), the only prose text, at child's height, of the American poet who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 and died in 2023. T.St.

Jaap Robben, At dusk

Translated from Dutch by Guillaume Deneufbourg, Gallmeister, 416 pp., €24.90 (ebook: €15.99).

In the Netherlands, today: “In the twilight” of her life, Frieda remembers how the world seemed more beautiful to her when in 1963 she met Otto. He was a lepidopterist, which is to say that he devoted his life to the ephemeral, a strange paradox with warning value since he had disappeared when Frieda gave birth to their child; Otto was married and would never leave his wife. It was then for Frieda the beginning of a real obstacle course. This