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Chargement... Rose Mélie Rose (1987)par Marie Redonnet
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These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works. In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. Hôtel Splendid recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; Forever Valley is aboutnbsp;a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; Rose Mellie Rose is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Ôat. Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett'snbsp;work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . [They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end." Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)843.914Literature French French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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For some reason, and it was a surprise to me, this short novel felt more realized than the first two in the trilogy. But there is no way I would ever compare Marie Redonnet with the writing of Annie Ernaux, Samuel Beckett, or any other person champions in her corner are wont to do for her. She is her own, and no label or comparison will do anyone justice, or any good. The almost-innocent childlike voice of every narrator in all three books of the trilogy can at times remind me of Agota Kristof, but the final result fails in comparison. This trilogy is in no way a brilliant work of fiction, but pure enjoyment can be had in reading them. Redonnet certainly has style, and that matters. Perhaps a novel of hers to come will strike me as masterful. In the meantime I am satisfied in the way in which she fares.
What is interesting, and sometimes a bit puzzling, is how Redonnet in all her books has her young girl characters nonchalantly experiencing, for example, their first period, falling prey to lecherous men who only want them as sex objects, and the girls routinely coming back for more sexual abuse even from the same pathetic guys. Never is any love involved, no emotion, just sex as if it was as normal and acceptable as the setting sun. Prostituting oneself is also expressed nonchalantly and assumed acceptable. It means nothing to these girls to be violently thrown onto the sand and taken, to be ordered to strip naked and be penetrated, or to be turned over and entered from behind. It is all presented in her text as matter-of-fact, no despair, no feeling of injustice or their having been violated. Instead the young girls continue expecting more of the same, and even go looking for it. And to make matters even more disconcerting, in these clever and well-written books there is rarely a decent man available to even have a loving relationship with. But for some reason there is no review yet written that questions any of my concerns relative to the writing of Redonnet. It is almost as if her readers have become complicit in her undertakings and care little about another's undoing or destruction. Or perhaps it is my own puritan upbringing fighting for years to maintain its awful strangling hold on me, and my struggle to conform to a world that rarely, if ever, makes sense. ( )