On the Sand
Publisher
:
S. Wespieser éditeur
Parution date
:
EAN
:
9782848050713
Number of pages
:
148
Description
***Translation sample available***
Sur le sable is luminous and sensitive—a multilayered story into which Lesbre plunges the reader deep into the intimate past of two damaged characters.
The narrator, who has just left her companion, has decided to escape from Paris for a few days. As she drives along the coastline, enjoying her last moments before returning to the capital, she sees flames shooting out from the dunes. Without thought, without calling for help, she walks across the hot sand to locate the starting point of the fire. She finds a man sitting alone in front of a house that is being consumed by fire. “That’s nothing. It’s my little war,” he says. “It’s finished. I came to an end with it.” The stranger persuades her to stay with him, and he begins to reveal the secrets of his heart. They sit and talk for hours, for the whole night, with the burning dune becoming the catalyst for both of them to try to face their own little wars.
The stranger learns that the narrator is a night porter in a Parisian hotel. We find out that she takes advantage of her quiet job to reread all the works of Patrick Modiano, a novelist who often writes of the unknowable sense of self. At work, she gives names from Modiano’s books to every guest of the hotel—and finally, to everyone she meets. She has immersed herself so deeply into the atmosphere in his books that her thoughts become muddled and she vacillates between past and present, between his fiction and her reality. There comes a point when her world becomes unreal and her mind is peopled with the ghosts of Modiano’s characters. As she talks with the man on the beach, she becomes even more confused. Their life stories reflect each other as they question the meaning of their early days, their adult lives . . . and the consequences of their love affairs.
This novel is both a story of remembrance and a tribute to Modiano. Lesbre builds a bridge between the narrator’s experiences and Modiano’s novels by including characters, situations, hotel names, and passages extracted from his books. She tells us a superb and singular story that we can easily appreciate without ever having read the work of Patrick Modiano.
Author
Michèle Lesbre : Born in 1947 in Poitiers, Michèle Lesbre was a schoolteacher for several years before deciding to take up writing. She published detective novels until 2001, when she published her first work of literary fiction, Nina, par hasard. Since then she has published Boléro (Actes Sud, 2003), Un certain Felloni (Actes Sud, 2004), La petite trotteuse (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2005), and Le canapé rouge (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2007), which was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and was translated into eight languages.
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