in the heart of an intimate tribunal
[ad_1]
“The Innocents”, by Mahir Guven, Grasset, 496 p., €24, digital €17.
“Don’t talk too much. You have to save time. » This recommendation, the last made by his wife, Noé Stéphan, 35, still haunts her between the walls of her cell, after being accused of the murder of her friend Paul Chance. Probably not enough, however: it is one word too many, considered impertinent, which earned him being knocked out by a policeman while in police custody. Between life and death, Noé dives back into his memories to understand how he got there, and therefore give himself a second chance.
The new novel by Mahir Guven, author of Big brother (Philippe Rey), winner of the Goncourt prize for the first novel in 2018, is organized around this face-to-face with a shaky past. But beyond the unique journey, where the adult Noah rubs shoulders with the one he was and questions him, the reader also follows the tribulations of those who accompanied him. Among the multitude of wounded souls, each as imperfect as the other but terribly endearing, stands out “la joy”a maternal figure à la Romain Gary, who struggles to ensure that her son succeeds, selling pizzas, slapping the pain in the face and presiding, somewhere below the conscience of Noah, an inner tribunal where those who influenced his existence – Gabriel Kalender, Kurdish refugee and constant companion, Mehdi Laroui the hazard, finally Marjolaine, witness to the rape of his girlfriend and who is silent, all take the stand.
Breton separatist
Between humor and cruelty, this novel is also that of the first times. The first time that Noé wins by playing marbles, that he swims in apnea, that he tries to sleep with a girl, in vain, and that he succeeds, the first time that he fights, that he hears the truth about his father, a Breton separatist and largely absent from his life, whose return he never stopped seeking.
Between the flaws with which it is necessary to live and build oneself, the unsaid which throw the veil on the truth, it is these founding years that he recrosses, those which go from early childhood to the end of adolescence, past in the suburb of Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, near Nantes.
Innocents is the epic of a youth, that of the generation born in the 1990s, as much as a vast plea in favor of the marginalized, of “those who have not read the notice” – “the losers, the naive, the lost, the badly dressed, the frumpy, the without scooters, the guys with their hems soiled by bicycle chains, the children of the unemployed, the demonstrators, the dented (…), the big dreamersNoah will say – to which Mahir Guven gives a voice.
You have 1.79% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
[ad_2]
Source link
