The ghosts of Capri. They left. Without knowing very well what direction, without perhaps really having said it. A couple at odds with everyday life, with a reality that they cannot help but suspect of being fallacious. He comes from Sweden, she from Paris, they made music together, and then a child. And then… And then, here they go. To the south. Naples first and finally Capri where nothing is ever quite finished, where the dead play with the living, organize strange bacchanalia in the Lysis villa of Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, and the two travelers invite themselves there lost, in addition to great artistic and deceased Italian figures, the singer Caruso or the poet Ada Negri. Are the ghosts of the past really so sweet? No matter since, as the young French woman writes who must know that the dead always seizes the living: “I wonder if we too are part of a lost world: that of spirits that swirl, without finding rest. Capri takes us in like castaways, she doesn’t judge us. He doesn’t care if we are dead or alive. The ballad of the spirits. We are the secrets that are never revealed. »
In terms of secrets, those of the night, of exhaustion, of solitude, but also of an always possible re-enchantment, that would be enough of Marie Modiano’s business. With The inner island, her fourth novel (the first by Robert Laffont), a dark and graceful fantasy in the Bay of Naples, she offers her infinitely accomplished poetic art. Of course, this is a contemporary version of Dream of a summer night discussed in these pages. But the reader should not be fooled, the stylistic exercise is infinitely profound and delivers perhaps the author’s most clearly personal text. Here, we can guess, she is as close as possible to her truth. As close as possible to his taste for these tremors of reality which form the basis of his universe. There is a fruitful indecision there, a dialogue between poetry and the conduct of the story, a sense of cock-a-donkey which borders on surrealism and even more surely with the novels of the all-too-forgotten today André Pieyre de Mandiargues. We know whose daughter Marie Modiano is, we discover that the family is bigger than expected.
Marie Modiano
The inner island
Robert Laffont
Edition: 4,000 copies.
Price: €18; 180 p.
ISBN: 9782221268124
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