Novelists, essayists, screenwriters, philosophers, poets… From Nathalie Azoulai to Peter Szendy via Lola Lafon, André Markowicz, Gaël Faye, Emmanuel Guibert… they are sixteen authors who have entrusted us with their tastes in terms of literary gifts.
For Nathalie Azoulai: “The Friend”, by Sigrid Nunez
It is a book that I would have liked to write and that I loved to read, reread, offer, re-offer. The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez (Stock, 2019), is the story of a woman, a New York intellectual, who, after the suicide of her best friend, inherits his dog, a Great Dane (or Mastiff German), which she must house in her very small studio. I did not feel a priori very concerned by this whole affair, however, from the start, I thought: I too have a very dear friend whose disappearance will capsize me all the more because he will not leave me nothing, not even his dog.
This is the whole point of this book to ask whether Apollo, the initially hated dog, does not produce the miracle of reviving the nameless friend, even advantageously replacing him. While the first, a thrice-married writer, disappears, we witness the rebirth of love with this dog as faithful as his master was not. We pity the narrator as much as we understand her thanks to her finesse, her calm and ironic emotion, her skilful, supple changes of register, passing from the most truthful to the most romantic, from the tragic to the burlesque. Sigrid Nunez excels in the art of typically Anglo-Saxon non-fiction, carried by an anonymous but intimate voice, a voice that seems to speak directly to us.
Whether we think of Eula Biss or Deborah Levy, these Anglo-Saxons know how to create paper alter egos who trick and evade, but who, despite their casualness and their pretenses, communicate to the reader a precious, whimsical and warm wisdom. , a comfort that is neither uplifting, nor sentimental, nor overly narcissistic. In The Friend, the anecdote surpasses itself and gets carried away. At a time of year when loneliness is sometimes stretched to the extreme, here is a book that makes friendship bear fruit, since we no longer know if the friend is a man, a woman, a dog or the book. himself.
Last book published by Nathalie Azoulai: “The Perfect Girl” (P.O.L, 2022).
For Sandrine Collette: “La Grosse”, by Françoise Lefèvre
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