“The Great Strange Homelands”, by Guillaume Sire, Calmann-Lévy, 352 p., €21.90, digital €15.
Selected for the 2024 “Le Monde” Literary Prize
Guillaume Sire has a taste for epic novels and courageous characters, overflowing with panache. Such seem to be the common points of books as different asBefore the long flame (Calmann-Lévy, 2020), which plunged a young boy with a fertile imagination into the horror of the Cambodian civil war, The Foothills (Calmann-Lévy, 2022), where a family fought with paltry weapons to keep their castle, and, today, The Great Strange Homelands.
It is a crossing of the first half of the 20th centurye century in the footsteps of Joseph Portedor, whose name alone is a promise of adventure. As a child, this Toulousain made it his mission to « sauver » Anima Halbron, the little girl from the floor below, with whom he fell in love at first sight. The two neighbors share a founding mourning: that of the father, killed during the First World War, for Joseph, and that of his older brother, died of a child fever, for Anima.
Apart from their companionship with ghosts, they could not present more distinct personalities. Joseph is endowed with a sometimes cumbersome hypersensitivity; his touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight are extremely developed and constantly saturate him with information about his environment. Anima has built a shell of coldness for herself, the piano is her only object of interest, and her contempt (ambivalent, all the same) for great feelings goes so far as to name “Lamour” a pig that she saved from the slaughterhouse and hid.
Chivalrous hero
Anima is Jewish, and it is in particular from the anti-Semitic peril that Joseph would like to protect her, he who, after the young girl’s move to Paris, where she will become a concert pianist, sees in each “Death to the Jews” written on the walls the sign that she is in distress and needs him. His conviction that he must defend her, forged in his reading of swashbuckling novels, will take the chivalrous hero to Koblenz, Germany, in the middle of the Second World War.
From the 1920s to the aftermath of the Liberation, the characters of Great Strange Homelands (the title is borrowed from the poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane, 1898-1944) evolve in a world in the grip of chaos. “Everything is fine. There is nothing to understand.”repeats throughout the book Thérèse, his mother, to Joseph, who refuses to accept it. He struggles to understand events and people with the help of his hypersensitivity, which seems as much an infirmity – everything hurts him – as a superpower – he can tell if a woman is pregnant by simply touching her hand.
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