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Dans la Floride se?gre?gationniste des anne?es 1960, le jeune Elwood Curtis prend tre?s a? coeur le message de paix de Martin Luther King. Pre?t a? inte?grer l'universite? pour y faire de brillantes e?tudes, il voit s'e?vanouir ses re?ves d'avenir lorsque, a? la suite d'une erreur judiciaire, on l'envoie a? la Nickel Academy, une maison de correction qui s'engage a? faire des de?linquants des hommes honne?tes et honorables. Sauf qu'il s'agit en re?alite? d'un endroit cauchemardesque, ou? les pensionnaires sont soumis aux pires se?vices. Elwood trouve toutefois un allie? pre?cieux en la personne de Turner, avec qui il se lie d'amitie?. Mais l'ide?alisme de l'un et le scepticisme de l'autre auront des conse?quences de?chirantes.… (plus d'informations)
Ce septième roman de Colson Whitehead est son second à être récompensé par le prix Pulitzer de la fiction, après son précédent roman, Underground Railroad, qui l'avait déjà obtenu. Ce prix est tout autant mérité, l'ouvrage étant encore une fois très bon. L'auteur revisite cette fois une autre réalité historique du passé des Noirs américains. Et autant il avait utilisé un artifice de fiction en inventant un vrai chemin de fer clandestin pour aborder avec originalité la période de l'esclavagisme américain dans les États du Sud, autant ici, l'auteur ne fait qu'utiliser des informations recueillies sur la vie d'anciens détenus dans un centre correctionnel de rééducation pour jeunes mineurs de Floride. Son talent est de rendre tout de suite réel cet enfer et les pauvres adolescents qui y vivent. En quelques pages, on est plongé avec eux dans leur univers et l'expérience est difficile. Un roman poignant, qui rend un hommage saisissant à tous ceux qui sont passés par de tels établissements. ( )
Magnifique. Un roman aussi noir que le sont les pauvres pensionnaires de cet "institut" Nickel, noir comme les âmes damnées des "surveillants", tortionnaires pour la plupart. Destin brisé d'un jeune homme à qui la vie aurait pu sourire, on sort désespéré de cette lecture, et totalement admiratif de l'écriture de Colson Whitehead ( )
The books feel like a mission, and it’s an essential one. In a mass culture where there is no shortage of fiction, nonfiction, movies and documentaries dramatizing slavery and its sequels under other names (whether Jim Crow or mass incarceration or “I can’t breathe”), Whitehead is implicitly asking why so much of this output has so little effect or staying power. He applies a master storyteller’s muscle not just to excavating a grievous past but to examining the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or “neatly erase” the stories he is driven to tell.
Even when he’s arrested on the flimsiest evidence and sentenced to Nickel Academy, Elwood clings to his faith that goodness will be rewarded, that the rule of law will prevail. The academy, as Whitehead presents it, is a place of well-groomed exteriors and encouraging principles — a place, if you will, like the United States at large... And what a deeply troubling novel this is. It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment.
Même morts, les garçons étaient un problème. Le cimetière clandestin se trouvait dans la partie nord du campus de Nickel, sur un demi-hectare de mauvaises herbes entre l’ancienne grange et la déchetterie de l’école. [...]
I 1
Le cadeau qu’Elwood reçut pour Noël en 1962 fut le plus beau de sa vie, même s’il lui mit dans la tête des idées qui signèrent sa perte. [...]
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
They were sent to Nickel for offenses Elwood had never heard of: malingering, mopery, incorrigibility. Words the boys didn't understand either, but what was the point when their meaning was clear enough: Nickel. I got busted for sleeping in a garage to keep warm, I stole five dollars from my teacher, I drank a bottle of cough syrup and went wild one night. I was on my own trying to get by (Whitehead 81).
He had a date, now he needed a course of action. He felt rotten those first days out of the hospital until he came up with a scheme that combined Turner's advice with what he'd learned from his heroes in the movement. Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he'd make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he'd make it through (Whitehead 93).
“It used to be worse in the old days,” Harper said, “from what my aunt says. But the state cracked down and now we lay off the south-campus stuff.” Meaning, they only sold the black students' supplies. “We had this good old boy who used to run Nickel, Roberts, who would've sold the air you breathe if he could've. Now that was a crook!” (Whitehead 97).
The boy had been a reedy little runt when he got to Nickel and regularly punked out his first year until he learned to fight, and then he preyed on the smaller kids, taking them into closets and supply rooms—you teach what you're taught (Whitehead 170).
Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it.
The theme music was stuck in his head now, and Elwood would have hummed or whistled but he didn't want to look like a copycat. The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard. It occurred to Elwood that he'd never seen a Negro in the small town of Mayberry, where the show took place.
Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.
Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook's rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.
Still, the law was corrupt and capricious in various measure and sometimes a boy strolled out through what passed for divine intervention.
The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.
Competitors for apartments, for schools, for the very air—all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering. You can do it.
The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small. This was just one place. A lunch counter in New Orleans, a public pool in Baltimore that they filled with concrete rather than allow black kids to dip a toe in it. This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of Nickels and White Houses scattered across the land like pain factories.
It sounded how people sound when they have God in their mouth
The ring of keys on his belt jangled like the spurs on a sheriff in a Western.
You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other.
Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color.
The two fighters were the same height and build, hacked from the same quarry.
He'd had the thought of getting his GED in the back of his mind for a while. Tended to it like it was a candle flame cupped in his hand out of the wind.
He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.
Silverfish and centipedes made a break for it as the boys dragged the trunks to the center of the basement.
His thoughts prowled and roved after midnight.
Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom.
The place was worse luck on top of bad luck, cursed.
They treat us like subhumans in our own country. Always have. Maybe always will.
How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch?
Only reason to fix a fight is because you're betting on it. (Elwood)
Derniers mots
(Epilogue)
[...]. Il avait faim et le restaurant était ouvert, c'est tout ce qu'il demandait.
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
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▾Descriptions de livres
Dans la Floride se?gre?gationniste des anne?es 1960, le jeune Elwood Curtis prend tre?s a? coeur le message de paix de Martin Luther King. Pre?t a? inte?grer l'universite? pour y faire de brillantes e?tudes, il voit s'e?vanouir ses re?ves d'avenir lorsque, a? la suite d'une erreur judiciaire, on l'envoie a? la Nickel Academy, une maison de correction qui s'engage a? faire des de?linquants des hommes honne?tes et honorables. Sauf qu'il s'agit en re?alite? d'un endroit cauchemardesque, ou? les pensionnaires sont soumis aux pires se?vices. Elwood trouve toutefois un allie? pre?cieux en la personne de Turner, avec qui il se lie d'amitie?. Mais l'ide?alisme de l'un et le scepticisme de l'autre auront des conse?quences de?chirantes.
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