"The Eternal Bridegroom" rings at least twice

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• Today, our community of contributors recommends “The Eternal Fiancé” by Agnès Desarthe, published on August 19, 2021 by Éditions de l'Olivier.

Cathy Borie, author and contributor to the

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, recommends

by Agnès Desarthe, published on August 19, 2021 by Éditions de l'Olivier. 

Her favorite quote:

“I would like, as in music, to be able to start everything from the beginning.

"

Why this book?

• Because each line of this novel finds an echo

  in most of us, it calls out in each sentence our way of being in the world, what is happening with the passage of time, memory, nostalgia, of the present that does not exist and of the past that cannot be changed. It is a novel on nostalgia, but also on the imagination, on what has been and on what could have been, on different conjugations at infinite times: conditional, more-than-perfect, imperfect, past tense. , which gives the story a support that is both familiar and evanescent.

• Because the characters are both full of originality

  and close to us, between an ordinary life and a dream life, and there is necessarily one in which we will recognize ourselves, recognize our emotions, thoughts, regrets, his memories, his questions.

  And say like the narrator: “I don't know who I am.

  I never knew it and I know it less and less.

  "

• Because music is omnipresent in this novel

  and that, even if you are not a musician, it serves as a perfect metaphor for the unfolding of a life as the author presents it to us: it speaks to us of rhythm, of breath , breathing, pause, silence, harmony, and we are carried away by this melody full of nostalgia.

• Because it is also an allegory of writing:

  Agnès Desarthe here challenges the linear unfolding of time by imagining the paths she did not take, she creates a fiction in the narrative of reality, she imagines and makes assumptions, and invents lives that did not take place but could have… “I am at the center.

  On the left, my past, on the right my future, and I, in the middle, in the present, in the unbearable present.

  "

  
  

The essentials in 2 minutes

The plot.

 The narrator takes us into her past, looking back on a meeting in the year she was four years old with the one she met on several occasions during her life, her “eternal fiancé”.

By pulling this thread, she dissects several scenes from her life, evoking the passing of time and memory.

Characters.

 The narrator ;

his father ;

his mother ;

his sisters, Lise and Dora;

Etienne, the eternal fiancé;

Martin, Etienne's brother;

Marie-Louise, his grandmother;

Rita, Etienne's daughter;

Antonia, Rita's mother;

Yves, the narrator's husband ...

Places.

 The apartment where the narrator spent her childhood;

various places in the narrator's daily life.

The time.

 Nowadays with many back and forth in the previous decades from the years 1960-1970.

The author.

 Agnès Desarthe is a multiple award-winning novelist who has also published numerous children's books.

She is also a translator of several books.

This book was read with

 the feeling of intimately grasping each sentence of the novel.

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