“They only think about living in peace; they have everything they need to be happy: work and youth.” Reading a book by Irène Némirovsky means taking care of yourself, loving yourself. For every topic she addresses, she is capable of capturing hidden nuances, shamefully suppressed perspectives, and the most appropriate words. Whether we find ourselves in a wealthy, bourgeois family in the city or at a provincial landowner’s court, Némirovsky is capable of penetrating to...
“Lying on her side with her dead daughter on her chest, she felt her daughter slowly cooling. Then she had no more tears.” It’s a white book, with a sincere and far from banal title; skimming the table of contents, you’ll find yourself thinking: snow, fog, and so on. You’re probably thinking of a simple book, imbued with the purity to which Korean literature, and specifically Han Kang’s, has become somewhat accustomed. We’re faced with...
“The comic is more cruel: it brutally reveals to us the insignificance of everything.” Born from the union of two short texts published in the 1980s in Le Débat, the book offers an even more intimate insight into Kundera. In both the first essay (Prague, Disappearing Poetry) and the second (Eighty-Nine Words), one gets the impression of a champion of beauty, memory, truth, and a firm resolve to avoid compromise. With the Force of Reason,...
“She is so surprised to see her mother leaning over her that she forgets to cry.” We are certainly witnessing a narrative experiment. A successful idea, but one that we weren’t ready for at the beginning of the novel, and in fact, we read the first five pages twice. Written almost entirely in the second person singular, the book immediately conveys a sense of alienation, as if the narrator wanted to simultaneously care for the...
“Orsola treats me like an adult. As an equal. Obedience doesn’t mean subordination.“ The flavor of the words and the human touch Fleur Jaeggy narrates in this book are unparalleled. They bring back memories forgotten in a short time. Empathizing with the protagonists of the story comes naturally, even though the reader is unlikely to have experienced the events recounted. The immortality of the text lies in the precise reflection of certain interpersonal dynamics, typical...
“The man had turned off the light and lay down again. He hadn’t fallen asleep again.“ We enter the story with a sense of suspicion, almost thriller-like, especially in the opening pages, where the first chapter ended with a resounding wow. This driving force drove the reader to read and unravel the narrative, rich in details, descriptions, objects, and lists, until reaching the midpoint of the book, precisely halfway through, where a new and resounding...
“Love, my dear, is a feeling of luxury.” The story is about a love that shouldn’t have happened, just as it shouldn’t have died. On one side, we have Yves Harteloup, a wealthy man who has lost much of his wealth and is forced to live like a common clerk in early 1900s Paris, and Denise Jessaint, the young wife of a wealthy businessman, Yves’s comrade in arms during the Great War. The two meet...
“Some people think about it, some don’t. I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years. I try to prepare myself.” After reading, we found ourselves emotionally exhausted, perhaps still partly so. A book that sooner or later, in a form we cannot imagine, we will find ourselves writing. Each in their own way, each with the right amount of blank pages and unfinished sentences. How much do we really know our mother? Beyond her social...
“If they had loved me, maybe I would have been beautiful too.” We weren’t ready to read such a beautiful book. We weren’t physically or emotionally ready. A full-throttle dive into melancholy, with no desire to climb back up. Some passages moved us like we hadn’t in a long time; but this shouldn’t make you think it’s a sad book. It’s a text capable of opening the heart like a child, letting in all the...
“…the idea belongs to whoever develops it, and I will pretend I never had this idea of becoming a startupper.” The book is a collection of stories (we can’t say whether they’re autobiographical or free reworkings of stories the author heard), some of which appeared as newspaper articles, others unpublished, written during his long stay in California. This long period allowed Masneri to gather life experiences and testimonies that help us understand the American world,...
