Novel. Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam tells the teenager Farah, the parents rather bizarre, who took refuge in a community for battered. Delightful!
Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam has genius to tell with tenderness the battered, the weird, the margins. In Arcadia, it snatches us from the first paragraph.
It starts in a car, the narrator is a child. His grandmother is driving. His parents ? We do not know anything about the father at the moment, but the mother, swaddled with tissues
shielded, screams. However, the driver avoids at best relay antennas and high-voltage lines. We understand: the lady is electro-hypersensitive. They arrive, at night, in a house, Liberty House, in the hinterland of the Côte d'Azur, not far from the Italian border.
A tower of Babel
Follows a succulent gallery of unusual characters. The grandmother, a naturist, wears piercings under the belt level, at the height of the eyes (and hands) of a 3 year old. (If you do not burst into laughter at reading this scene, we can not do much for you ...). I do not disclose anything, we are only on the fourth page of the novel, which has more than 400.
The residents of the place all wander a little beside their pumps. The guru, who welcomes all these cripples, is called Arcady. He advocates love. From that, everything is possible. We follow the narrator, Farah. She becomes a teenager, in this environment slightly crazy, but so benevolent. She is not cold-blooded, she who, from an early age, has "maturity for three", who assists her parents, confronts herself with vague gender identities, meets a migrant in the garden and finds him decorative...
It's totally contemporary, free, sensual. Of a mad intelligence, of a frank and sumptuous writing. The story is complex, addresses many issues of society, with the grace of a dragonfly wing. Social networks against virgin nature, regimentation or freedom to live, exist or consume ... It is built like the Tower of Babel, and at the end, we find the list of authors to whom the author has borrowed quotations. Dizzying.
Arcadia , POL, 440 pages, € 19.