“Beginnings”, “Me and more beautiful”, “GPS”… Our reading choices

THE MORNING LIST

This week, we offer you four of the ten novels in the running for the literary prize of the World : Beginningsby Catherine Millet; Me more beautifulby Guillaume Le Touze; Indoorsby Claire Baglin, and gps, by Lucia Rico.

You will also be able to share the questions of young adults from Where are you, wonderful world?, by Sally Rooney, immerse yourself in the life of Thomas Mann, subject of Wizardby Colm Toibin, and discover the fight of the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean, with The Last Colony, by Philip Sands.

NOVEL. ” Beginnings »by Catherine Millet

With BeginningsCatherine Millet continues withA dream childhood (Flammarion), 2014). What makes this new book moving is that it clings to the previous one, like an attempt to perpetuate the poetic bubble specific to childhood. He tells how Catherine Millet wanted to stay connected, despite the passage of time, to this tranquility paramount.

After leaving the family apartment in Bois-Colombes, in the Parisian suburbs, this self-taught has gradually made a place for itself in the world of art. What is most striking, because it is difficult to see how this would still be possible today, is that she succeeded in doing so by slipping on the surface of reality, between solitude and confidence, in the simple contemplation of the world.

Catherine Millet has a great talent for welcoming life, escorting it, giving it momentum. His art critics set in motion the apparently most frozen works. His books carry the ordinary course of existence, his own but also that of others, which is revived. When she was a young journalist, the little suburbanite who was afraid of everything suddenly gained confidence in front of her typewriter, allowing herself to say things she would not have dared to say at a dinner or a meeting. Since then, she has built each book as a space for reverie where contradictions need not be resolved, and where the imagination can roam free. John Birnbaum

NOVEL. “Me more beautiful”, by Guillaume Le Touze

Guillaume Le Touze likes alternate routes. In Me more beautiful, the novelist brings to life a character, Xavier, whose job is as formidable as it is imaginary: he is a railway archaeologist. He goes in search of vestiges of disappeared railways. Which, in terms of alternative routes, gives rise to prospects: “When he drives on the motorway towards Montpellier, [Xavier] is probably the only one to move on the Via Domitia. »

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