Book: Camille de Toledo and "Theseus, his new life", funeral poem over four generations
Camille de Toledo, the writer of “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” (Verdier).
© Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
3 min
Unhappy finalist for the Goncourt Prize, it is still a book to slip under the Christmas tree.
A particular novel, a sort of funeral poem spanning four generations, constructed from texts and black and white photographs.
With “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” (Editions Verdier), the French writer Camille de Toledo plunges us into his family history.
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Camille de Toledo
begins this disturbing and upsetting family story with a lowercase letter t: “
you, my brother, tell me… who is committing the murder of a man who kills himself?
»
Thésée, his new life
makes us live an introspection as deep as terrifying after the suicide of his brother Jérôme, fifteen years ago.
From the very first lines, he forges links between his own history and the history of the 20th century, but he digs into the past well beyond.
The author defines his novel, told in the first person, sometimes in the third, as an "
archaic story
" that opens up, but to us, readers, it presents itself as a new literary form, between period novel, poetry, resuscitated photographic archives punctuating the stories and the pages.
The novel by this particular writer who studied history and political science and who is also a plastic artist and videographer, also oscillates between a private diary (“
Jérôme, my brother, why were you so named?
”), Myth modern ("
a father alone unties the rope from which his son hanged himself
") and biblical: "
this is your childhood
".
The heir
On all 252 pages hovers the heavy past of his ancestors "
who bore the name of expelled, from Toledo, Spaniards, then Ottomans, recognized as French, denounced as Jews
" and of which he feels as much heir as of this murderous twentieth century. of which he himself lived a part.
The character of Theseus who has just lost his brother, his father and his mother, and who in 2012 made his boxes to leave with his children "
the city of the West
", in search of a new life, before being caught up in the past, is the alter ego of the novelist.
Born in 1976 under the name Alexis Mital, this grandson of Antoine Riboud, founder of the Danone group, and grand-nephew of the famous photographer Marc Riboud, chose Camille de Toledo as his pen name, in homage to the first name of his maternal great-grandfather and the last name of his paternal grandmother.
The writer was already distinguished before by his writings mixing styles of writing and genres, for example with
Le Hêtre et le Bouleau, an essay on European sadness,
in 2009. At one point, he felt obliged to open the boxes remained closed and to confront his past and that of his ancestors.
It is not trivial that the author, who defended a thesis on "vertigo", sought to resonate with his past in Berlin, where he currently lives.
► (Re) listen: Camille de Toledo, in the twentieth century labyrinth
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Camille de Toledo, in the twentieth century labyrinth