“Among other solitudes”, by Yves Harté, Le Cherche Midi, “Les passe-murailles”, 176 p., €19, digital €13.
Yves Harté, Grand Prize of the French Academy of hand on heart (Le Cherche Midi, 2022), publishes, with the same publisher, Among other solitudes. “My father died in the winter, at the beginning of 2004, when he was about to turn 70”writes. Empty the house. What do we keep? An exhausting ritual, a double mourning… A mediocre journalist, the son returns without enthusiasm to the dead father’s house: father and son no longer speak. very fast, Among other solitudes takes off, as if absorbed by the strong storms that are there, on the edge of the Landes and the Pyrenees.
Journalist, Yves Harté was himself an important reporter and editorial writer for the newspaper. Southwest (Albert-London Prize 1990), author of notable portraits and reports. It’s not about “him,” but he’s worried. Its narrator, a melancholic bachelor of about forty, comes down from Bordeaux towards the Pyrenees. That fades or emerges, according to the winds. Upon returning from the completed ritual, the Pyrenees and the sky merge in his rearview mirror: “It seemed to me that I was leaving the country of my childhood forever. »
It is the novel of endings, that of the disappearance of the countryside. Furthermore, it is not that they were explicitly condemned: a piece of vineyard, six cows, “The land was still good, but it no longer suited the times.” Disappearance of those times when humans spoke to animals (who responded to them with an accent), erasure of landscapes, tools, berets and speech…
Harté has never separated his journalistic writings from literature itself: it is the least courtesy he owes to the reader, he says. Among other solitudes It quickly becomes a formidable mechanical tip rewinding machine. In the unsaleable occupied farm where his father had taken refuge, the modest forty-year-old gets a file in his name, carefully classified (and annotated!) by his late father (who was a teacher and rugby coach).
white shadows
The file brings together articles that he wrote twenty years earlier, with a view to a collection, quickly abandoned, on loneliness. Portraits of fallen women, pillars of bars, pillars of rugby who no longer play fifteen, but two, “face to face” with alcohol. Solitary loquacious or silent, the white shadows of the Yellow Café made them die of laughter as they laugh at 20 years old, him, the journalist’s apprentice and two friends his age. So many disfigured lives, cruel destinies reinvented in twelve lines.
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