Philippe Besson, Céline Laurens and Mariana Enriquez: the books not to be missed

This is not a news item

By Philippe Besson.

Julliard, 208 pages, €20.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

What energy! In almost six years, Philippe Besson will have written an autobiographical trilogy (stop with your lies, A certain Paul Darrigrand, Dinner in Montreal), performed a Macronian prank (A novel character), accompanied by a lonely mother (The Last Child)boarded a Paris-Briancon deadly, and here he is grappling with an extreme tragedy: the murder of a woman by her husband in front of the eyes of their 13-year-old teenager, Léa. No, don’t shout, we don’t divulge anything, the information comes from the third page of the 22nd novel by the writer TGV, This is not a news item.

It was the big brother, 19 years old at the time of the events, who took up the pen. It is he, quadrille at the Paris Opera, whom his little sister calls from the family home of Blanquefort to teach him the unthinkable. Questioned by the gendarmerie commander, Léa recounts what she saw with a maturity that arouses admiration but also the concern of the brother, the circumstances of the feminicide take shape – an argument, insults, followed by 17 stab wounds . Over the course of the story, the characters take shape: the trucidée, daughter of a tobacconist and tobacconist herself, will not have ceased to calm the outbursts of her husband, an angry and eternally dissatisfied worker, until his paranoia win. Narcissistic pervert, the word is thrown out at the end of the novel… And the son sinks into the guilt of someone who hasn’t tried to find out. From this pattern, unfortunately classic, the author comes out very well, always very comfortable analyzing human feelings, probing fraternal ties, identifying the flaws in society and evoking the status and fate of women. Every detail of this news item that he prefers to call “social fact” rings true. PM

Under a faience sky

By Celine Laurens.

Albin Michel, 268 pages, €20.90.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

No offense to the ayatollahs of running, the metro is resisting. A year ago, Solange Bied-Charreton published Paris under the ground, a poetic essay on his wanderings in the corridors and on the trains. Céline Laurens follows suit with Under a faience skya novel located almost entirely in the metro, and more precisely on line 6 – what better than an overhead line to write a lively book?

The hero of this story, a driver by trade, spends his days between the Charles-de-Gaulle and Nation stations, passing through Passy, ​​Raspail, Bel-Air or Picpus. It will have escaped no one that this title, Under a faience skycomes from the Gainsbourg song, The Puncher of the Lilacs, which dates from 1958. Céline Laurens is not an amnesiac novelist: she has a taste for the slang of yesteryear and likes to swing the French language. In his previous book, Where the caravan goes, it featured gypsies in a picturesque patois. Here, she benevolently plays with the survival of a certain titi spirit via a gallery of colorful characters, singers, Parisian onlookers and other “atmosphere faces” as Arletty would say… If we won’t reveal the terminus of this book, let’s say that its burlesque and shimmering style becomes more serious as we approach the end of the line. Sadness spares no one, and the metro also has its share of melancholy. Humor, strolling and spleen go hand in hand here. The descendants of Raymond Queneau and Léon-Paul Fargue have a bright future ahead of them. Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld

The dangers of smoking in bed

By Mariana Enriquez, trans. from Spanish by Anne Plantagenet.

Editions du Sous-sol, 237 pages, €21.

The rating of L’Express: 4/5

Young fans digging up the body of their idol, a month after his death, to eat his remains (Meat); a woman who masturbates for hours while listening to heartbeats and indulges in an escalation of dangerous fantasies with a cardiac man (where are you my heart); children or teenagers who disappeared, reappearing, years later, unchanged, a silent army invading the parks of Buenos Aires (The Little Ghosts) : with The dangers of smoking in bed, Mariana Enriquez delivers a horribly beautiful collection of short stories. And deeply disturbing. The Argentinian author, to whom we owe in particular Our part of the nightgreat critical success – rewarded among others by the price of the Imaginary 2022 -, pulls the reader, dumbfounded, towards a meticulous exploration of the undergrounds of the human soul.

Drawn, almost in spite of ourselves, into these cruel tales that transcend the codes of the horror genre, we turn pale, grimace, oscillating between rejection and fascination. Here, no start or palpitations but a diffuse malaise, faced with the abyss whose hideous faces appear as so many symptoms of the dysfunctions of a sick society where the ghosts of the Argentine dictatorship hover. A totally disenchanted world, with no possible repair or oblivion, populated by everything (them) that we don’t want to see. Mariana Enriquez delves into the unspeakable, carried by a writing that is all the more evocative in that it is essentially descriptive, almost neutral. The images it summons stick to the retina so permanently that they become encrusted and become ours. Behind, crouching between the lines, something rumbles. A furious breath, sublime and disturbing. Pauline Leduc