How not to like a book whose narrator inquires thanks to L’Express (from page 25)? Having so healthy readings does not prevent losing your head. In April 2020, at the start of the first confinement, Lucie met a man by walking her dog near the Monceau park. An adulterous story is born between them. This passion does not leave Lucie alone. She remains traumatized by that day in 1996 when her mother had taught her that she was not her father’s daughter.
Let’s go back a little in time… In 1974, in Montevideo, a year after the coup that established the military dictatorship in Uruguay, the doctor Luis finds himself faced with a moral dilemma: he is asked to sign the certificates of Death more than suspect of opponents of the regime who was tortured in prison. No longer able, he leaves his wife and two children there and flees for France, who welcomes him as a political refugee. In exile in Lille, he met Mathilde, the assistant of the dean of the Faculty of Medicine. Luis and Mathilde deny their reciprocal attraction as long as possible. Until they give in and the French, married, falls pregnant with her lover, who will soon leave in the country …
This enchanting first novel, Love and other liesreads as we open Russian dolls-well, South American Russian dolls more than Slavs. We find there the atmosphere of certain novels by Miguel Bonnefoy. In Bonnefoy Chile and Venezuela, Laetitia de Luca l’Uruguay. The first is lyrical, the second more melancholy. Because a shadow hangs over the Lucie’s link. Would she only reproduce her mother’s acts? Was this very romantic adventure with Luis a moment of error or his greatest love? The labyrinths of psychogenealogy are very popular in current literature, not always for the better. Laetitia de Luca borrows them with more finesse than many of her sisters and colleagues. The relationship between Lucie and his half-sister, his quest for any link with his biological father: there are touching scenes. We did not know that Parc Monceau has a secret passage to the Montevideo of the 1970s …
Love and other lies. By Laetitia de Luca. Robert Laffont, 251 p., € 20.