Here is (my) ideal little basket of presents, starting with some very good foreign novels such as Eden (Zulma) by the mischievous Audur Ava Olafsdottir who proposes replacing English with Icelandic as the universal language because her “language is the only one that uses the same word to say ‘the world’ and ‘at home’, which means that we are at home everywhere. What more beautiful offering than this ode to a language, but also to Icelandic nature particularly affected by climate change! Another highly recommendable foreigner, the immense Robert Seethaler whose The Nameless Café (Sabine Wespieser), set in Vienna in the 1960s and 70s, constitutes a wonderful x-ray of the little Austrian people.
Change of scenery, head to the merciless world of cinema, from the pen of the mischievous Fabrice Caro. With Scenario diary (Gallimard), the new co-author of Asterix (The white Iris, with Didier Conrad) triggers smiles as his antihero, screenwriter by trade, must swallow snakes following the dictates of M6’s financiers and suffer renunciation after renunciation. George Lucas, too, fought, but with more success, against the more formidable Hollywood majors to make Star Wars in 1977. His story can be devoured in the graphic novel Lucas Wars (Deman Editions), signed Hopman and Roche, exceptional portrait of a pugnacious thirty-year-old and fascinating story of a making-of.
Do you prefer clarity to the dark side of the Force? Read Panorama (Gallimard) by Lilia Hassaine, one of those chilling dystopias, or comforting if you like total transparency to the point of living in aquarium homes. Any last advice? The vibrant and delicate Washed memory (Mercury of France), by the Mauritian Nathacha Appanah. It is about his ancestors having landed in Port Louis, capital of Mauritius, then British, on August 1, 1872, from the port of Madras (today Chennai). And thus having endured, like 453,063 of their compatriots between 1834 and 1920, a long crossing through the “black waters” of the Indian Ocean before coming to engage in the sugar plantations. It’s difficult, with this basket, not to please those around you who are so diverse.