what “ogre paws” do to women
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“Her favorite”, by Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sabine Wespieser, 206 p., €20, digital €15.
“Suddenly he has a gun in his hands. » No time to settle down. From the first sentence of His favoritethe violence is there, ready to ravage a perfectly ordinary family meal. “The minute before, I swear, we were eating potatoes. » Only here, in this family of the mountains of Valais, in Switzerland, a frightful and repetitive scenario is set up. In the evening, when the father comes home, reeking of alcohol, all it takes is a trifle, an extra clove in the stew, the rain, the chatter of one of his daughters, for him to ‘irritated. Let him scream. Whether he slaps his wife or his eldest, sends them flying, throws bottles across the room. And sometimes picks up a gun.
Three women subjected to a truck driver “ogre paws”. Everyone has their own way of coping, or escaping. The mother takes the hits and devours romance novels. The eldest clasps her hands over her ears. His sister listens to everything, on the contrary, in order to better detect the noises, the words heralding the storm. Above all, she writes. At the age of 8, she tinkers with a first book and discovers the immense power it gives her: “Get me out of my life. » She is, of course, the narrator. The one who stands up to her father, and believes in the saving virtues of fiction.
From chapter to chapter, the closed session becomes more bitter. The brutal father turns out to be a rapist, possibly a murderer. The sister prostitutes herself. The doctor who saw the wounds and the cockroaches prefers to be silent. The weight of the family heritage increases until it becomes intolerable. The reader, however, is never tempted to flee. He clings. He accompanies Jeanne in search of a way out.
The multiple meanings of the title
All the talent of Sarah Jollien-Fardel is there. The author, a Swiss journalist born in 1971, does not mention Paul Auster in her text by chance. For this hard-hitting first novel, she learned several lessons from the American master. Like him, she firmly grasps the reader’s hand from the first paragraph, and does not let go until the end. No dead time. No fat. It is with consummate art that she advances new elements over the pages, only when they become necessary. The first name of the narrator only appears on page 21. That of her mother, page 123. The multiple meanings of the title are gradually revealed. And when the story could falter, Jeanne’s departure for the Ecole Normale d’Instituteurs and then her sister’s suicide are there to relaunch it with force.
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