What to read in spring 2024? The “Point”’s favorites

HASu closer to the savagery of the assassins, to an American university in the depths of the Colombian jungle, in search of butterflies, of a fallen Lebanon or of a second life… the roads of literature are decidedly limitless, Here are a few so you don’t leave April without a thread of readings.

The Resurrection of Salman Rushdie

On August 12, 2022, an attack would almost cost Salman Rushdie his life, thirty-three years after the fatwa launched against him. Breaking the silence after the dozen stabbings that left him for dead and deprived of his right eye, Salman Rushdie, who spoke in our columns of his need to write this story to put an end to this “elephant in the room” , become obsessive, publishes The knifesubtitle Reflections following an assassination attempt. Written in the first person because, “when someone sticks a knife in your flesh several times, it’s a fairly intimate story”, cutting with emotion, intelligence and humor, this book is the story of a resurrection where death is overcome by life, and hatred by love. Salman Rushdie recounts the terrible attack, his hospital odyssey, his fear of losing his sight, his imaginary dialogue with the killer, and also his “wounded”, but “solid” happiness, with Eliza, the Eurydice who came to look for him, with love, in the depths of Hell.

The knife. Reflections following an assassination attempt, by Salman Rushdie. Translated from English by Gérard Meudal (Gallimard, 272 p., €23).

Savagery according to Tiffany McDaniel

Tiffany McDaniel’s new novel reconnects with the intensity of Betty who discovered it in 2020. It is inspired by a real event: in 2015, six women were murdered in the city of Chillicothe, Ohio, drug addicts and prostitutes. Their bodies were found in the river. The police botched the investigation. Nobody cares about a few heroin addicts except Tiffany McDaniel, who imagines their lives. Two little twin girls, Arc and Daffie, are the main characters, and among the thousand magical things their hippie grandmother taught them before she died, there was the art of crocheting a blanket. On the front side, the wool squares are smooth and harmonious. On the tail side, it’s chaos, the threads stick out, the pattern gets blurred. This is the “wild side”. Grandma Milkweed has the solution: “When the wild side becomes unbearable,” she says, “you take a needle and bring in the threads. » This novel is magnificent because it is “too much”: too black, too vibrant, too moving, too sad. Life overflows on every page, cruel and beautiful like the river.

On the wild sideby Tiffany McDaniel, translated from English (United States) by François Happe (Gallmeister, 720 p., €26.90).

Jean Rolin runs behind the butterflies

After having made his pen dance on The Bezons Bridge (POL), our wind-soled writer takes her to the Côte d’Azur in search of a missing colleague, Katherine Mansfield. At least that was the initial project before his compass went crazy and replaced the Riviera shores with the mudflats of Cayenne. How ? For what ? The narrator explains his desire for Guyana, born from watching a scene from the film, where we see Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman trying to capture butterflies to hand them over to an agent from the Cayenne penal colony. From the Juvisy fair, a den of collectors, to the meanders of the Maroni river, the author takes us not to chase butterflies, but to follow those who built their fortune on their backs. Throughout the irresistible logorrhea inseparable from the “Rolin style”, we laugh madly at the absurdity of a world which has succeeded in monetizing even the slender wings of butterflies.

The Butterflies of the penal colonyby Jean Rolin, POL, March 2024, 208 pages, 19 euros.

The fallen Lebanon of Dominique Eddé

Portrait of a Christian Lebanese bourgeoisie threatened in a chaotic Lebanon, at the mercy of the decisions of Hezbollah, this novel refers in a striking way to current events. Salim, the perfect incarnation of this fallen world, is still in love with Léonora, whom he married while this Italian woman who came to Lebanon had thrown aside her nun’s habit, and barely married, left her husband and baby to live her passion with a filmmaker. Turkish. At 76, she lives almost as a recluse in her palace, close to Salim whom she has never stopped loving, who lives in a neighboring hotel. Their son, from time to time, visits, irascible, impatient to enter the struggle in the name of Christians, revolted against his parents fixed in the tolerant values ​​of a lost Lebanon. Subtly protean – letters, dialogues, monologues – this palace mixes present and past, brings together Filipino servants and young French companions, prostitutes and taxi drivers, and, from these two, we hear the Arabic language singing in these pages. The beauty of the book is as admirable in its themes as in its form, so original.

The Mawal Palaceby Dominique Eddé, Albin Michel, March 2024, 220 pages, 19.90 euros.

The resistance fighter found by Hervé Le Tellier

On the village square of Montjoux, near Dieulefit (Drôme), stands a war memorial like there is in every village in France. On this monument, a name, which Hervé Le Tellier found engraved in the plaster of the house he had just purchased: Chaix André (May 1924 – August 1944). “The dates said it all: Chaix was a resistance fighter, a resistance fighter no doubt, a young man with a short life like many others. » The writer did not want to revive the FFI or compose “the novel of André”, who, like 13,678 of his comrades, fell on the field of honor. But “give meaning” to his look, “to be able to always smile with brotherhood” at the name engraved on the wall of his house. The story is written through the memories that have survived among the anonymous, and through digressions calling into question the national myth erected in the aftermath of the war in order to reestablish order and unity. If the sincerity that animates Hervé Le Tellier’s approach warms each of his paragraphs, it also resonates with a much more chilling ambient discourse, wanting our era to reproduce the errors of the 1930s.

Among wild beasts with Antonio Ungar

Following Eva, the new Colombian heroine by Antonio Ungar, in her thirst for a break with her bourgeois family, is to penetrate the jungle of this country in a way that a novel has rarely managed to do, inspired by real events, notes the author, which took place in Puerto Inirida from November 17 to 21, 1999. Eva is addicted to drugs, she must flee the capital and its inevitable temptations. She leaves for the ends of the world, with her little daughter Abril, in a new life as an almost monastic nurse. She will not resist the love declared to her by a trafficker as big as his name, Gordo Ochoa, and the almost family daily life that he offers her. But his companion must obey orders, a new gold route is discovered, he must leave mother and child to track it. In the heart of the jungle, where Eva ventures in his absence, to help a population in danger of starvation, the scenes are worthy of Conrad from Athe heart of darkness. A kaleidoscopic portrait of Colombia prey to the violence of the paramilitaries, drug traffickers, the Farc, everything we know about it from afar and which here is embodied in a humanity at every moment fighting for survival and which the author of this intense and captivating novel described with infinite tenderness.

Eva and the Wild Beasts. Translated from Spanish (Colombia) by Robert Amutio. Black on White, coll. “Notabilia”, 192 p., €19.50

The Second Life of the super Philippe Sollers

A few dozen pages dictated before his departure, barely reread, undoubtedly not corrected, which will upset those who know, against winds, rumors, slander and tides, that this writer, born Philippe Joyaux, was, is, one of the most important, most intelligent, most subtle of the time. Eighty pages, then. Super Sollers. Meditating on the “second life”. Sparkling Sollers. It’s very beautiful, very pure. Also very obscure, despite the moving and virtuoso afterword by Julia Kristeva, entitled “The vivace today”. The most chilling thing, all the same, is the last sentence of this booklet – where the last words thought and traced by the author resonate intensely: “If nothingness is there, it is there, seeing the world illuminated by a black sun. » What was Philippe thinking at that moment? What did he see? What did he smell like? Mystery. Brotherly closeness. His Second Life can begin. And forever continue.

The Second Lifeby Philippe Sollers, afterword by Julia Kristeva, Gallimard, March 2024, 80 pages, 13 euros.