Three novels, the stories of Pedro Almodóvar, an essay and the memoirs of François Guizot… Here is a brief review of six outstanding works in this forty-second week of the year.
Stories. “The Last Dream” by Pedro Almodóvar
Impetuous, crazy, extravagant, moving… The twelve –uneven– texts of the last dreamPedro Almodóvar’s first book of short stories, are a perfect image of their author. through this “fragmented autobiography”As he calls this set of writings written between 1967 and 2023, the director opens up and disguises himself. In “The Visit”, which gave rise to the film Bad education (2004), a woman dressed as a prostitute returns to the school where her younger brother was sexually abused by the director’s father: a direct echo of Almodóvar’s childhood spent in a “prison-school” Salesian. In “The Last Dream,” the author movingly recounts his mother’s last moments: why did she dream of a storm before passing away peacefully? Guided by a fanciful imagination, certain stories make the Madrid of the post-Franco years resonate strongly. This is the case of “Confessions of a sex symbol”, which stars a porn photo novel star accustomed to all excesses. Almodóvar, who says he has been writing since he was a child, reveals a true literary talent as a narrator, as in the moving “Life and Death of Miguel,” where he tells the reverse story of the existence of a young man who died at the age of 25. And it is a pen of unexpected elegance that he reveals when he portrays the loneliness of the days of Christmas and Easter spent in a deserted Madrid. Laughter and tears, extravagance and modesty. A range of the rich palette of an aspiring writer? Ar.S.
“The Last Dream”, by Pedro Almodóvar, translated from Spanish by Anne Plantagenet, Flammarion, 238 p., €21, digital €15.
Rehearsal. “The Arrow and the Shovel”, by Benjamin Iapara Batista, François Renoux and Stéphen Rostain
Decimated by the miasma that the explorers and settlers carried with them, the Native Americans then suffered the“invisibilization” of indigenous discourse for almost five hundred years. Because the history of Guyana has only reached us through the Western prism, in a way “partial and partial”. This is the clear observation of indigenous Palikur language specialist Benjamin Iapara Batista, anthropologist François Renoux and archaeologist Stéphen Rostain. However, colonial chronicles often rely on “unreliable rumors”. Native American myths, archaeological excavations and observation of landscapes have, on the other hand, a lot to say about the past of the peoples established in this territory. Oral tradition thus evokes Amerindian warriors, equipped with armor and weapons. Along the road between Cayenne and Kourou we find reeds planted that follow the layout of an ancient “war path” having opposed Palikur and Kali’na, a conflict absent from European chronicles.
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