While waiting for Goncourt, read "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (3/4)

Theseus, his new life -

• As a result of the health crisis, the Goncourt prize is delayed this year.

• By November 30, why not read one of the four finalists, see all four?

• Today, our community of readers-contributors recommends “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” by Camille de Toledo, published on August 1, 2020 by Éditions Verdier.

Christian Dorsan, writer, blogger and early contributor to the

Books

reading group

, recommends

 de Camille de Toledo.

Published on August 1, 2020 by Éditions Verdier, this book is one of the four finalists for the 2020 Goncourt Prize which will be awarded on November 30.

Her favorite quote:

He wants to believe at the start, in the eastern city to which he is embarking;

the brother who remains tells himself that he is now an orphan and it is from this orphanage that he hopes to invent what he calls his revival.

Why this book?

• Because we must never break the 11th commandment:

  reopen the doors of the past, this warning is the narrator throughout the book who repeats it to the reader.

• Because it is constructed in the manner of a funeral song at the beginning of the novel:

  the eras will mix for the narrator with the use of an "he", sometimes "of the brother who remains" because what the first name Thésée, it is a flight in a labyrinth of which he does not know the monster which hides there.

• Because the whole novel holds in this test of time

  in which the hero never ceases to disentangle himself from it.

  He wants to know the reasons for the suicide of his brother and it is another suicide that he will discover, that of a grandfather who has lost a son and a brother.

  The Minotaur is appointed, a drama that continues from generation to generation in secrecy.

  But is the labyrinth really the one delimited and why flee to Germany?

• Because the story alternates introspection and aside, like the choirs

   of ancient tragedies.

  We get lost in the twists and turns of this family history.

  It is only at the end that the reader benefits from a linear story in epistolary form which gives all its consistency to the novel.

  
  

The essentials in 2 minutes

The plot.

 A man leaves Paris for Berlin in order to flee the dead of his family.

He buried his brother, his mother and his father.

He then sinks into a family labyrinth where he will have to fight to understand a repeating past.

Characters.

 The author who is "the brother who remains", the brother who committed suicide, the parents, a great-grandfather, a great-great-uncle and an Owed, the child who wanted to be the first Jewish king of France ...

Places.

 Paris, Berlin.

The time.

 Comings and goings in the present day, the 1980s, the First World War and the interwar years.

The author.

 Camille de Toledo is a writer, literature teacher, laureate of the Villa Medici.

He is the grandson of Antoine Riboud whom he tells in Thésée, the story of the family.

This book was read with

 difficulty in the first two thirds of the book, it is when the author tackles the narration of the history of the family, that everything is revealed and brings to the story a dimension of ancient tragedy.

Buy this book on the Internet

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To read also >> Prix Goncourt (1/4): “L'Anomalie” reveals the prodigious singularity of Hervé Le Tellier

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20 minutes of context

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