The Office for the Clarification of Destinies, By Gaelle Nohant. Grasset, 408 pages, €23.
The rating of L’Express: 3/5
The Office for the Clarification of Fates : it looks like the title of a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, which suits Gaëlle Nohant, who has something of Amélie Poulain. She wishes she could mend the living and the dead. His greatest success to date, The Part of the Flames (2015), resuscitated the fire of the Bazar de la Charité, which occurred in 1897. As for his latest novel, The Revealed Woman (2020), he recounted the riots that tore Chicago apart in 1968. With empathy, and always with documentation worthy of an archivist-paleographer, Gaëlle Nohant likes to dive back into the convulsions of history to do justice to the vanquished and the disappeared.
The Office for the Clarification of Fates is undoubtedly her book in which she pushes her concern for the victims the furthest: this time, she tackles the Shoah. Its heroine, Irene, works at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. One of its missions consists in returning to the families the objects (here a pierrot and a medallion) having belonged to the deportees. This is an opportunity for Irène to travel, to find descendants or relatives, to exorcise people haunted by the ghosts of psychogenealogy. We thus follow Irène investigating in Warsaw, searching correspondence, plugging the holes of broken destinies…
The Office for the Clarification of Fates
© / Grasset
If we can only salute the art of the author’s soap opera, the critic must raise a hare. Each September and January, the deportation inspires several writers. Even when we prefer Proust to Sainte-Beuve, a question deserves to be asked: on this delicate theme, can the novel compete with the autobiographical narrative? This month, Nicole Bacharan (The strongest of allStock) and Marie de Lattre (The promise, Robert Laffont) write very moving texts, the first about his mother, the second about his grandparents. In Gaëlle Nohant’s novel, the intimate pages on the private life of Irene, a single mother, are the most touching, because the most inhabited. What if Gaëlle Nohant one day abandoned the others and allowed herself to write about herself? With the modesty that characterizes her, she would make beautiful books.