Lola Lafon, the words to say it

French novelist Lola Lafon in studio at RFI (September 2020) © RFI / Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint

By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint

3 min

Writer and musician, coming from a family of Franco-Russian-Polish origins, Lola Lafon is the author of five novels including La petite communiste qui never smile, multiple award.

She has just published Chavirer at the Actes Sud editions, a capsizing fiction on adolescence shattered by sexual predators.

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1984. Cléo, thirteen years old, who lives between her parents a modest existence in the Parisian suburbs, is one day offered to obtain a scholarship, issued by a mysterious foundation, to realize her dream

: to become a modern jazz dancer.

But it is a trap, sexual, redeemable, which closes on her and in which she will lead other schoolgirls.

2019. A file of photos is found on the net, the police call for witnesses to those who were victims of the foundation.

Having become a dancer, especially on Drucker's sets in the 1990s, Cléo understands that a past that does not pass has come back to seek her, and that it is time to face her double burden of victim and culprit.

Chavirer follows the various stages of Cléo's destiny through the eyes of those who knew her while her character diffracts and recomposes itself at will, like our mutant identities and the mysteries that govern them.

Revisiting predation systems in the light of the social and racial divide, Lola Lafon offers here an ardent meditation on the dead ends of forgiveness, while paying tribute to the world of popular variety where the smile is contractual and false eyelashes are compulsory, between an eroticized body and a suffering body, the magic of the stage and the backstage of pain.

»

 (Presentation of the Actes Sud editions)

Cover of Lola Lafon's new novel © Actes Sud

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