“Sleep your brute sleep”, by Carole Martinez, Gallimard, 398 p., €22, digital €15.
Children do not want to sleep. They demand stories to push back time. Just a little longer, just one more page, before this sleep they fear carries them away, takes them away and leaves them, abandoned to themselves, at the borders of an unknown space. Eyes closed, they throw themselves into the void. But the terror of the fall is followed (who does not remember it?) by an aerial lightness. There they are, gliding, flying. And if they touch the ground even a little, a simple kick of the heel makes them rise back up into the heavens. This intoxication is however very fragile. It only takes nothing, an unknown breath, a color, a sudden vision, for the enchantment to turn into a nightmare.
Carole Martinez’s new novel explores children’s dreams. In Sleep your brute sleepshe advances in the wasteland of a long disturbing tale where landmarks fade, where reality escapes, where the worst dangers threaten. On which side of the world does this adventure take place? In which reverse, in which reflection, did it begin?
Eva is a neurologist, a sleep specialist. She ran away, leaving Paris and her research position with Lucie, her 8-year-old daughter. Pierre, her husband, was becoming more and more violent, especially with the little girl. She found refuge in a small house lost in the middle of nowhere, in the Camargue. There, she slowly regains her calm. She can breathe. No one around. Except for a distant neighbor, a sort of gruff loner they met one day in the reed beds when he had just saved a wild goose wounded by a hunter. Lucie, who since she arrived, has lived to the rhythm of nature, learned the names of plants and birds, and immediately became attached to the guy. Eva, wary, would prefer him to keep his distance. One night, the little girl starts screaming horribly. What black beast has crossed her sleep? What her mother does not yet know is that, carried “at the speed of the Earth’s rotation”the same cry, like a terrible clamor, was uttered, together, by all the children of the world.
Entangling the supernatural with secrets
Of Sewn Hearthis first novel, Fawn roses (Gallimard, 2007 and 2020), Carole Martinez never ceases to entangle the supernatural with secrets, abandonments, troubles, and dull anxieties that are sometimes dispelled by astonishing embellishments. In The tilting earth (Gallimard, 2015), a little girl who died in the 14th centurye century continued to exist in the foggy memories of its old ghost. Here, it is all of humanity that seems to be delivered to the specters in a planetary poltergeist. The long, heartbreaking cry was a preamble. Carried crescendo by the dreams of children, apocalyptic catastrophes occur. The ten plagues of Egypt strike again. The spell must be broken. And one must rise from this frightening dream.
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