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Today, "Where does love come from" by Yann Queffélec, published on August 17, 2022 by Éditions Calmann Levy.
Christian Dorsan, novelist, blogger and contributor to the 20 Minutes
Books reading group
, recommends
Where does love come
from by Yann Queffélec, published on August 17, 2022 by Éditions Calmann Levy.
His favorite quote:
The city ?
She dreamed of it.
And the factory did not scare him.
And sure that the snake was the sins that the girls kept talking about at school, without talking about it and that Cléclé told her she could never do without.
And neither had she tasted it with a decent guy.
Why this book?
Because to read Yann Queffélec is to embark on stories
that mix narration and fantasy: he knows how to give a mythological dimension to his characters as well as to the places in which they evolve.
We like his high verb: "For Célestin, the war had a spiked helmet and it shit fire on the heads of children"
Because the dark period of the occupation is conducive
to the combination of circumstances where simple citizens become resistant or collaborators.
It's all about encounters with destiny: "fate loves 'suddens', life hates them".
The author tells human stories, evokes slippages which in normal times would be forgiven and which in times of war are heavy with consequences, like this young boy who betrays the resistance only to see the crotch of a woman informer.
Because there is always depth in Yann Queffélec,
his vision of humanity is lucid.
Still, the title of the novel is quite enigmatic because it's either an unanswered question or a revelation, but in both cases it doesn't give any real clue about the origin of love, except that this sad observation: "The most mysterious human love tells life that loneliness is unbearable, with time, that it drives you crazy".
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
Daughter of a Cévennes hamlet during the war, Maud left for Vigan to work in a factory.
She falls in love and pregnant with the boss's son, but in the Cévennes things are not so simple between holiness, occupants, resistance fighters and collaborators, everyone has their own perception of duty.
Characters.
Muriel and Célestin, parents of Maud, her son Eddie;
Toï the Spanish refugee, Samuel Pujol the lover, Aunt Rachel, the officer "friend" Astecker and his sadistic superior Muller, the resistance fighters of the "G" network, the collaborators and Cléclé, the good friend and little Maxou.
Places.
Cévennes Gardoises: the hamlet of Les Fabrègues, Le Vigan.
The time.
World War II, the years of occupation of the Cévennes Gard
The author.
Yann Queffélec is an essential author of the French literary landscape.
A prolific author, crowned by the Goncourt Prize in 1985, passionate about the sea, he published the remarkable Dictionary of Brittany lovers in 2018
This book was read with.
Read with appetite, carried away by Yann Queffélec's willingly talkative verb which oscillates between narration and oneirism.
A multiple, sometimes complex, historical and angry novel about a troubled period in which bastards and heroes merge.
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