CHow could the son have imagined this father, who had become almost a stranger, leaning over a manuscript that he had abandoned in this “stocky farmhouse planted on a hillside on the edge of the Landes and the Pyrenees” that he has come to empty today, since the father died instantly in a road accident, at the age of 70? The entire novel by Yves Harté, written in a quality of language that is soberly in keeping with that of the great prose writers of our time – Michon, Bergounioux – or prose writer – Marie-Hélène Lafon –, is built on this gentle, measured, calm astonishment, but where the pulse of deep emotions constantly beats.
A journalist (like Harté, who received the Albert-Londres prize in 1990 and, as a writer, that of the Académie française in 2023), the narrator had formerly written short stories dealing with solitude based on a series of reports on “lives of misfortune” : his encounters with an alcoholic, who disappeared and then came back to the café, where “one evening he brought him back, dry and prodigal”, with a proud cripple, with a schoolteacher with a double life… So many trajectories riveted to solitude illuminating a rural France, invisible, and resonating all the more today.
A much loved father
The narrator rereads his texts with overwhelming humanity and dignity, all the more so for the reader, who follows the gaze of his father, Henri, fixed on this collection recomposed and even annotated by him, who loved reading so much. More […] Read more
