" I do not know by where to start. It is very difficult. There all that time gone, that words will never return, and also faces, the smiles, the wounds. But we must still try to say that. To say that for twenty years I worked my heart. Remorse and the big issues. We need to open my knife mystery like a belly, and I plunged both hands, even if nothing will change anything. "
1917. A small village in north-eastern France, near the front where the first World War sounded their guns. By a cold December morning, a little girl of ten years - Beautiful Day, as she is nicknamed - is found strangled near the canal. The narrator returns to the crime occurred years earlier. A crime which is still surrounded by some mysteries, and from which we draw, through the pages, the portrait of the villagers.
Starting with Pierre-Ange Msg, former prosecutor in retirement after more than thirty years of practice. An impressive man, very talkative and detached, can pronounce sentences of death without qualms. A lonely man, living far from the world, holed up in his huge palace along with two servants who do are rewarded by a few words a day.
There is this young woman, Lysia Verhareine, "[...] far too beautiful, too beautiful to be a teacher, nice to not have a job. " The new teacher of the village, immediately appreciated by everybody, including by the Prosecutor. No doubt she was also the only one who ever knew ... understand
And then there are others. Other characters, other personalities, other souls. Gray souls. "The bastards, the saints, I have never seen. There is neither all black or all white, gray is the wins. Men and their souls, it's the same ... You're a soul gray gray nicely, as we all ... ".
Throughout this dark history, punctuated by incessant travel in time in which it is sometimes difficult not to get lost, we see them still rather pull these black souls to tragic destinies ... The contempt indignation, anger, humiliation, despair, bitterness or pessimism paint the backdrop to this story where each character carries with it a heavy and equally dark secret. The narrator himself, in the final pages of the book, we made a revelation as terrifying as disturbing, the book offers a powerful and unexpected ending.
The scenes are described with such precision that one feels the cold of that December morning which envelops the lifeless body and tempered Beautiful Day ; means the icy silence that accompanies this scene is visualized with disgust cynical behavior of the judge can ask for poached eggs and eat them next to the corpse of the little girl he regards with disdain ...
A precision, added to a first-person narration and the use of a highly personal tone, gives the story an authentic character, and sometimes looks like a diary. "For so long I feel dead. I pretend to live a little longer. I stay, that's all. " the narrator tells us.
A nuanced writing, poetry and made suggestions, but always full of pessimism and a sadness that envelops us all over before we bury it under its own weight in the final pages.
Finally, remember that this small masterpiece by Paul Claudel? A cold and brutal book, which overcomes morality. A dark atmosphere, the image of these souls to gray fates that populate the novel. A complex pattern in which the author himself seems to be lost: "All this sounds well entangled, like a cock-and-l'âne shambles, but basically it is just like my life, which was made as sharp pieces, impossible to pick. "
written a remarkable book that may not like but which is struggling to emerge unscathed.
Melissa Hoffmann
published in the Chronicle BSC News Magazine October
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