Nothomb, Jaenada, Chalandon: a literary re-entry in 2021 marked by the weight of history – franceinfo

The literary return to school returns this year to its usual rhythm with a total of 521 novels in bookstores starting August 19. After fearing the worst during the confinements and bookstore closures of 2020, but surprised by very good figures since December, the book industry is attacking this crucial period with great optimism.

July was “very good for the bookstore. Still no drop in attendance compared to July 2020“, testified for example an anonymous bookseller on Twitter, @librairesecache. And the second half of August signs, as always, the arrival of heavyweights expected by impatient readers. Of the 521 novels, “379 are French novels (+13 compared to 2020), including 75 early novels (+10), and 142 are translated novels (-3)”, had specified Livres Hebdo on June 30.

Amélie Nothomb, faithful to the appointment every year, publishes one of her best novels, First blood (Albin Michel), fictional memories of his father who died last year. Where we discover an eccentric family, and rediscover a tragic episode in the history of the former Zaire by this Belgian diplomat. “I will not have the Goncourt (…) They consider that I am a successful author and that I do not need it, and that can be defended”, she said to Parisian this Tuesday August 17th.

Sorj Chalandon with Bastard child (Grasset), Marc Dugain with Willingness (Gallimard), François Noudelmann with The Children of Cadillac (Gallimard) also evoke their ancestry in the midst of the dramas and wars of the twentieth century.

Holocaust haunts other authors: Anne Berest delves into Jewish roots after receiving Postcard (Grasset) or Gisèle Berkman who describes a survivor in Mrs (Arléa). Anti-Semitism before the First World War is the subject of Christophe Donner’s fresco, France goy (Grasset), while Jean-Christophe Grangé evokes assassinations in Berlin high society at the end of the 1930s in The Promises (Albin Michel, released on September 9). On the side of Santiago H. Amigorena, The first exile (POL) comes back on his flight to Uruguay when Argentina was the victim of the 1968 military coup.

The torments of Africa and slavery point in Mamba Point blues (Presses de la Cité) by Christophe Naigeon, who travels between New York, France and Liberia, or in The Gate of the No Return Journey (Threshold) by David Diop, novelist recently awarded the International Booker Prize, who signs a fictionalized version of the adventures of a French naturalist in Senegal in the 18th century.

Of blues it is also question in Delta blues (Grasset) by Julien Delmaire, who tells the story of the birth of this music in the Mississippi Delta. Closer to us in time, Philippe Jaenada searches the most striking news item of the 1960s, the Lucien Léger affair: In the spring of the monsters (Mialet-Barrault).

Michaël Prazan draws the portrait of a former Japanese Red Army officer with Memories of the Shore of the Dead (Rivages), and Julie Ruocco explores Syrian Kurdistan and its surroundings, ravaged by the conflict of the past ten years, in Furies (Actes Sud).

Other stories, very personal: those of Christine Angot who precisely reconstructs her past as a victim of incest (The Journey to the East, Flammarion), and Emmanuelle Lambert who remembers the beautiful moments with a father who died of cancer (My father’s boy, Stock).

The epic of two dissimilar women in The Definition of Happiness (Gallimard) by Catherine Cusset, the traumas of a former hairy man in A certain reason to live (Robert Laffont) by actor Philippe Torreton, a dark story told by Tanguy Viel, The Girl We Call (Midnight), or again Plasmas (Rivages), a confusing futuristic fiction by Céline Minard, has attracted the attention of critics.

But the king of sales promises to be Guillaume Musso again, who waits until September 21, well after all the books cited above, to tumble with The Unknown of the Seine (Calmann-Lévy).

To the foreign department, Shuggie Bath (Globe) by Briton Douglas Stuart, who evokes the working class at the time of Thatcherism. Madame Hayat (South Acts) by Turk Ahmet Altan, written in prison and not edited in his own country, and God loves Haiti (Caribéditions) by Dimity Elias Léger, are testimonies to the power of literature in the face of politics.

This new school year also marks the return of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Briton Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the sun“, Gallimard) and the American Richard Ford (Nothing to declare, Olive Tree). TAlways in the United States, Quentin Tarantino publishes his first novel Once upon a time in hollywood (Fayard). Book that will follow the adventures of a western actor and his understudy during the hippie movement.

Unknown in France, Natasha Trethewey is a voice that counts across the Atlantic in contemporary poetry. With Memorial Drive (Editions de l’Olivier), it plunges us into a very moving story, at the heart of its roots in the south of the United States. It is also a form of catharsis, thirty-five years after the murder of her mother, killed by her ex-husband.