Catherine Mavrikakis, in the footsteps of Anne Frank

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Writer Catherine Mavrikakis, in the studio at RFI (March 2020). © RFI / Fanny Renard

By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint

Catherine Mavrikakis was born in Chicago, to a French mother and a Greek father who grew up in Algeria. University student in Montreal, essayist, playwright, she is also the author of several fictions. His new novel "L'Annex", a very literary tribute to Anne Frank's journal, is published in France by editor Sabine Wespieser.

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French edition of the new novel by Catherine Mavrikakis © SW éditeur

"When she is not on a mission, Anna returns to Amsterdam, to the annex where Anne Frank hid with her family, before being deported, in 1944. During one of her visits, the spy understands that she is being followed. Without delay, her organization exfiles her to a protective house, the location of which she is supposed to ignore. But an allusion to Schwartz's smoked-meat convinces her that she will land in Montreal, the city of his grandparents, whose profession demands mastery of emotions and self-forgetfulness and is filled with memories of his childhood vacations.
As soon as she arrives in this new annex, another hidden section of her past recalls her: Celestino, responsible for looking after the nine members of their unusual community, is crazy about literature. In the apartment covered with libraries, Anna abandons herself to the reminiscences of her studies and her exclusive taste for reading, which she had sacrificed by changing her life.
With the whimsical supposedly Cuban butler, who nicknamed her Albertine, the spy renamed her fellow prisoners the names of the authors or the characters they mentioned to her: an old Slavic couple became the Turgenevs; a seemingly mundane agent, certainly capable of the worst, Meursault; the cat, Moortje, like that of Anne Frank. " (Presentation of SW editor)

In March 2020, SW publisher also published "Deuil cannibales et mélancoliques" , the first novel by Catherine Mavrikakis published in 2000 in Quebec.

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