2023-11-13 10:02:00
Living with a star
Let’s come to the latest published works. Fandango takes us back to the Petrograd of 1921, shivering with cold, hunger, fear, under the new communist regime. The hero of the novel buys paintings at low prices for an art dealer. Through art, he escapes from the grayness of his existence in a sunny and fraternal city, Zurbagan, which… only exists in painting! The author, Alexandre Grime (1880-1932), was an autodidact who came late to literature.
Nana Ekvtimishvili (Tbilisi, 1978), screenwriter of several Georgian films, is also the novelist of The Pear Orchard, translated into around fifteen languages. The story takes place in a school in Tbilisi which welcomes the mentally handicapped and abandoned children. Its heroine, Lena, 18, wants to be the protector of the weakest, including Irakli, who cannot accept that his mother will never come for him. One day, an American couple visits the boarding school. The young boy suddenly begins to hope, but they leave again… The writer, note the publishers, with Leila paints the portrait of a youth who seeks to free themselves from patriarchal traditions in Georgia in the 1990s, after its accession to the ‘independence.
L’Ange de Curaçao
In The Righteous, the Dutch writer Jan Brokken tells the incredible story of the rescue of thousands of Jews who had fled to Lithuania from the advance of the Nazi army in Poland. In 1940, the Dutch director of the Lithuanian subsidiary of Philips and honorary consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, worked for three weeks without anyone’s knowledge to issue visas for Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles, while his Japanese colleague Sugihara signed transit visas for his country.
Ten figures who made today’s Europe
Jan Blokken, the author of the meticulous investigation which revealed this heroic enterprise which remained unknown for a long time, is a writer born in 1949, to whom we owe novels, travel stories and literary studies (including The Baltic Souls, Denoël, 2013) translated into around twenty languages. By collecting the testimonies of survivors of the events of 1940 or their descendants, notably those living in Antwerp, he reconstructed the history of the man his protégés had nicknamed “The Angel of Curaçao” and that of the entire families who crossed Russia by the Trans-Siberian Railway to reach Kobe, from where some reached the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai and others continued towards the Caribbean Sea! What the courage and generosity of a “Righteous” person when confronted with a human tragedy can do.
⇒ Alexandre Grine | Fandango | novel | translated from Russian by Paul Lequesne | Black on White Editions | 128 pp., €17, digital €13
⇒ Nana Ekvtimishvili | The pear orchard | novel | translated from Georgian by Maia Varsimashvili-Raphael and Isabelle Ribadeau Dumas | Black on White Editions | 160 pp., €20, digital €16
⇒ Jan Brokken | The Righteous | story | translated from Dutch by Noëlle Michel | Black on White Editions | 528 pp., €26, digital €19
1699874222
#incredible #feat #Dutch #consul