2023-09-21 20:00:02
Five novels, three biographies, two essays… Here are brief reviews of ten notable works from the literary season in this thirty-eighth week of the year.
Biography. “Richelieu”, by Laurent Avesou
Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) has many ways of continuing to fascinate. The ambivalence is not the least, as demonstrated by the short and brilliant biographical summary that Laurent Avesou devotes to him in the “Destins” collection from young Calype editions. The historian, author of an (unpublished) thesis on “The legends of Richelieu”is aware of the multiple memorial avatars of the man who was Louis XIII’s prime minister from 1624 to his death, and knows how to play with all these figures, from the cynical tyrant painted by the romantics to the precursor of the Revolution imagined by certain republicans, followers of the Hegelian dialectic.
It shows, moreover, that the debate on his heritage agitated France from the day after his death, his long domination having left the kingdom both bloodless due to external and internal wars – in particular against the Protestants -, unified around the State and doubtful about the motivations of the great man. “Why did we have to go through this? », summarizes the biographer. What there was “traumatic” Did he have a necessity in his action? If it was a question, writes Avesou nicely, of sacrificing “the probity of the means to the greatness of the end”, are we really clear about the nature of this ending? Brief foray into the mystery of a man, and that of a country that he helped to build, whether we rejoice in it or not. Fl. Go
“Richelieu. In the service of his majesty”, by Laurent Allez, Calype, “Destins”, 112 p., €11.90.
Roman. «Adieu Tanger», by Salma El Moumni
Alia’s life is shattered the day Quentin, a French high school friend, unknowingly broadcasts naked self-portraits that she had taken on her smartphone – she wanted to understand why her body drives men crazy to the point of following her, to touch her, to insult her relentlessly. In order to avoid scandal or jail (the Moroccan penal code punishes voluntary nudity with prison), the teenager fled Tangier for Lyon. The originality of the first novel by Salma El Moumni, a normal student born in Morocco, in 1999, is to describe the « fabrication » of a woman from this revolting fact. How her loved ones and society locked Alia in a straitjacket of warnings. How, from childhood, she was reduced to this always guilty body. She tells herself in the second person, an utterance which has nothing artificial: Alia is not addressing herself, but the fantasy created by the devastating gaze of men. Since her harsh exile in Lyon, the young woman confronts her ghosts. She revisits her relationship with her father, who very early on burdens her with prohibitions linked to her gender. She wanted so much to be a boy, free and carefree… She remembers the attacks in the medina; of his great love, Ilias; rape, too, committed on her by Quentin, who holds her under his influence. “Writing is the last resort when you have betrayed”, notes Alia, quoting Annie Ernaux using a phrase from Jean Genet. With Salma El Moumni, a voice is born. Gl. It has.
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