“L’Agrafe”, by Maryline Desbiolles, ed. Sabine Wespieser, 150 p., €18, digital €14.
Selected for the 2024 “Le Monde” Literary Prize
It begins with a very visual scene The Staplethe new novel by Maryline Desbiolles, dedicated to a crazy and hindered story. In a long sequence shot breathtaking in its realism and beauty, the reader discovers a female character who does not yet have a name, only a body: she is a young woman who hurtles down a stony path in the hinterland of Nice at full speed and who runs from one “jerky, capricious manner”.
The thrilling sentences that describe her do not explain the reasons for this race. Is it an escape? An athlete’s training? Is she running to poetically inhabit the world, that of the maquis enveloped by the light of the South? Let’s say that the reader is a little worried about her. And Maryline Desbiolles, born in 1959, author of some thirty novels (winner of the Prix Femina for AnchisesSeuil, 1999), confirms to him after three pages that something is wrong.
Indeed, there is something of a catch in this story. In the course of a sentence, a detail reveals the left leg “massacred” of the young woman: her fibula, “staple” in Latin, this bone called “fibula” in the old nomenclature, is badly fractured.
This damaged woman is called Emma Fulconis. Her identity is revealed at the same time as her injury. She is the granddaughter of a family of harkis who took refuge in France in 1962 after the Algerian War, then parked in a forest hamlet in the south of France. This story, full of pain and humiliation, the young woman guesses it without feeling it intimately. She is close to her and a stranger at the same time. Because, in her family, “nothing is said, but nothing is hidden”She doesn’t try to understand what happened, she runs, “with all his heart”until it is caught up with reality.
Bite
While visiting a friend, Emma is suddenly attacked by the house dog (“a big fat bastard”) that lacerates her leg, does not want to let go, pulverizes his “staple”. And it is not this bite that hurts her the most, but the sentence of her friend’s father, heard before losing consciousness: “My dog doesn’t like Arabs.”
Obviously, the reader is burning to know more. But the author does not say everything. For Maryline Desbiolles, writing is maintaining a state of alert for as long as possible, until the outbreak of a drama that attacks the body and reaches the memory.
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