Cathy Borie writes so that there is not only "Dust and wind" left

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• Today, "Dust and Wind" by Cathy Borie published on December 2, 2022 by Éditions d'Avallon.

Marceline Bodier, bookstagrammer and contributor to the 20 Minutes Books reading group, recommends "From dust and wind" by Cathy Borie, published on December 2, 2022 by Éditions d'Avallon.

His favorite quote:

Why this book?

• Because the book, based on real facts, describes a process

  of transgenerational transmission and resilience: the great-grandfather, resistant, political deportee, suffered in the depths of his flesh;

  the grandmother, her daughter, faced a strange depression that did not speak its name;

  the mother, the author's double, writes this story to prevent only dust and wind from remaining;

  and the girl, who is only twenty years old, carries all this and has to live, like all of us, with the echoes of the crashes of the 20th century that resonate in a surprisingly intimate way.

• Because it's also a book about depression,

  as it was in years when it "wasn't yet fashionable" and when it wasn't named: "She was in pain, and she didn't know where or why".

  Resituated in this generational story, it goes far beyond the individual dimension: we see its roots in the wind of history, in this case the passage of an ancestor in the death camps.

  Because yes, we know well today that growing up in the unsaid is deleterious;

  but what else can you do when you're raised by a horror survivor?

• Because it is the emotional counterpart of

  The Origin of Violence

  ,

  by Fabrice Humbert.

  This book, also magnificent, embodies and intellectualizes the processes of psychogenealogy: it links the irrepressible violence that the narrator feels with the story of his biological grandfather, who died in deportation, whose existence he discovers in a fortuitous.

  Cathy Borie's book restores the full range of emotions they generate to these same mechanisms of trauma transmission and refers us to Elie Wiesel's sentence: "Whoever listens to a witness becomes one in turn". .

• Because it is also a book on family secrets

  and there is a real awareness at the key: a family secret is never just a more or less hidden isolated fact, but it is is a whole thread that the different family branches do not pull in the same way.

  In Emilien's family, all the branches do not integrate this patriarch in the same way in their imagination depending on what they know, depending on the way in which he indirectly made them hear his story, or not.

  Identity does not arise so much from shared genes as from a common founding narrative…

• Because reading Cathy Borie is always also an aesthetic pleasure,

  the one you feel when you cry at the moment of Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem, even the thousandth time, even knowing in advance that you will cry, just because it's beautiful and it makes a very sensitive little chord vibrate in the depths of oneself.

  I would have liked to choose the last paragraph of the chapter on the end of Emilien's life as an illustration of this chronicle, but that would be to diminish the force of the tears that spring from the reader who arrives there after pages that have taken him to the throat.

  Read them !

The essentials in 2 minutes

The plot.

The death of a mother... old photos, a deportee bracelet found... and the need to trace the thread of history, "as if the echoes of these old lives never ceased to reverberate in the following lives , and to leave tiny but indelible imprints on it”.

Characters.

Louis, Juliette, Margot;

Lorette, Jean, Mina, Gaspard;

Clarisse, Maryline and Nathalie;

Léa… four generations weighed down by the crushing shadow of one man: Émilien, born in 1899, deported in 1942, died in 1990, “the mythical figure of the family”.

But is the myth the same for everyone?

Places.

Festivals are celebrated in Corsica, destinies are built in the Dordogne, but it is still elsewhere that family stories break down: in Paris, in a light way;

and in Nazi Germany, in the Neuengamme camp, in a monstrous way.

The time.

What is an era, what is time, when we understand that the extent of the suffering endured by the deported generation in the 1940s did not end with those who lived in their flesh, but was transmitted to their descendants?

The author.

In her very rich work, Cathy Borie explores emotions that are difficult to face to allow us to look at them within ourselves.

Dust and Wind does it on the autobiographical side, as In the flesh of angels, Ana or A Thousand Wild Days did on the fictional side.

This book was read with

a whirlwind of strong emotions that made me cry tears that I wish for everyone.

It is the story of Cathy Borie's family, but it is also that of a cruel century and therefore necessarily ours, here and today, since we all have to live with her heritage.

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• Book sheet 20 Minutes

• Books

• Deportation

• Family

• Resistance