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Our community recommends a new book every day.
Today, "Le Grand Monde" by Pierre Lemaitre, published on January 25, 2022 by Éditions Calmann-Lévy.
Marceline Bodier, contributor to the 20 Minutes
Books reading group
, recommends
Le Grand Monde
by Pierre Lemaitre, published on January 25, 2022 by Éditions Calmann-Lévy.
His favorite quote:
For now, the important thing, in his eyes, was to know with what shoehorn he would introduce his theory into the Pandora's box he had opened.
Why this book?
Because the author, who has "no claim to compare himself
to the great writers of the 19th century", as he says in the press kit for Le
Grand Monde
, would therefore not have written the equivalent for the 20th century of
The Human Comedy
, nor of
Rougon-Macquart
. However, with its previous trilogy and the tetralogy that
Le Grand Monde
is now inaugurating , it rivals their historical fresco project as well as their romantic breath, and it is just as captivating. And like his predecessors, he resurrects a world by expanding the borders and the time of the one he knew and lived personally.
Because for all that, it's not
The Human Comedy
:
the processes he uses to resuscitate France, Lebanon and Indochina in 1948 are not the same. Balzac has been credited with his meticulous and interminable descriptions as much as he has been criticized for them: Lemaitre does the opposite. It gives milestones (take an interest in November 11, 1948), it sets the scene (we feel the moistness of Saigon with its characters), but it does so with the help of large landmarks without multiplying the details. He is a very modern author, who writes for today's readers.
Because it's not
Les Rougon-Macquart either
.
Admittedly, we are told that it is the Pelletier family, whose social and psychological (even physiological) determinisms that explain its destiny are clearly identified.
But Lemaitre does the opposite of Zola, who wants to show how the same causes produce the same effects: with Lemaitre, the same causes can be expressed in as different ways as there are characters.
It is difficult to make more dissimilar than the destinies of the four children, Jean, François, Étienne and Hélène…
Because
Le Grand Monde
is a whole program announced from the title.
It is of course the great world to which the parents aspired and to which the next generation does not necessarily aspire, or aspires without succeeding.
But it's also an opium den in Saigon and that's just like the whole book, where each character hides their true actions behind a smokescreen.
The prize is of course held by Jean and Geneviève, a couple that is both the most mismatched and the most accomplice that can exist, heirs to their author's years of black literature... extraordinary!
Because there is a strong link between
Goodbye up there
and
Le Grand Monde
, which
we understand without having to (re) read the first one.
We realize that everything that happened in
Goodbye up there
weighs to give its density and its meaning to the
Big World
.
Do you feel embarrassed to say more?
Normal, I am… but if you had to remember only one reason to read
Le Grand Monde
, it would be this mechanism, which led the author of a book that had the Goncourt to make his book appear after the fact awarded as the brilliant prologue of another.
More than a turnaround, it's a masterstroke.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
It's far too extensive to summarize, and the back cover doesn't attempt it: it gives a list that starts with love stories and ends with a few murders, passing through a big promotion on linens. .
There you go, you can start!
Characters.
Psychoanalysts could have a field day studying the links between Louis and Angèle, their four children, their lovers (sorry for this often improper term), the starlets, the legionnaires and other self-proclaimed popes.
Because yes, a link unites them all to the Pelletier family!
Places.
Paris, Saigon, Beirut: three cities, three atmospheres?
Yes, but also because the same members of the Pelletier family did not settle there.
The city where Jean is unleashed is not the one where Étienne loses his legionnaire, nor the one where the parents created "the soaps of the Levant"...
The time.
The plot takes place in 1948. If you used to give this year a gray aura of "post-war" just beginning flamboyant "thirty glorious years", you can revise your judgment: it was happening beautiful.
You will never look the same at your neighbors at the cinema again!
The author.
We don't present Pierre Lemaitre, but we can constantly renew the idea we had of him.
After having surprised us with the publication of a youth novel, he inaugurates a tetralogy which merges the black novel and the historical fresco.
With two constants: humor… and talent.
This book has been read with
admiration for an author who has nothing more to prove, and still manages to captivate us as if it were the first time.
Can't wait for the sequel to the trilogy!
Buy this book at Fnac
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