“Hard Land. Les 49 secrets de Grady” (Hard Land), by Benedict Wells, translated from German by Dominique Autrand, Slatkine & Cie, 300 p., €19, digital €13.
This is a good book. First, because a German author deviates from the two popular themes of current Germanic literature: family and gender. Then, and above all, because this book is a real pleasure to read. Benedict Wells is not at his first attempt. Born in 1984, in Munich, he burst onto the scene with The end of loneliness (Slatkine & Cie, 2017), a very beautiful novel regarding childhood and thorny life choices. This time, the main character of Wells, whose fifth novel this is, is a 15-year-old teenager who lives in a small town in the Midwest. This is not the first time that this John Irving fan has taken us to the United States, where he had already set his novel. almost great (Slatkine & Cie, 2020).
“This summer I fell in love, and my mother died. » That first phrase picks you up like an outstretched hand followed by a left hook. But it is not only a powerful introduction, it is also a reading contract, because Benedict Wells will never deviate from the two axes thus posed, which will serve as rails for his story. And yet, despite the two announced shocks, the first not annihilating the ravages of the other, it is not a depressing book.
Everything in filigree
There is certainly a kind of ambient sadness that bubbles with revolt – as in The Heart Catcherby JD Salinger (1951; Robert Laffont, 1953) – and nostalgia – as in Summer Tenantsby Charles Simmons (1997; Phébus, 1998) – but the compassion for the hero is such that he becomes a brother in arms, both for the author and for the reader, who finds Wells’ favorite themes here. : childhood, absence or sudden disappearance of parents, first love, loss of innocence.
We are in 1985, in Grady, a small town in Missouri where Sam, that is the name of the hero, finds his first summer job. Between boredom, mourning, movies like Back to the future and the music of Bruce Springsteen, develops a love story all in filigree, a story of friendship too, in a college where a grumpy but brilliant professor tries to make his students understand the (fictional) poem Hard Landby WJ Morris, whose deep meaning Sam will eventually discover thanks to the pretty Kristie.
A novel of initiation as much as learning, this book has all the ingredients to sink into pathos, but on the contrary it sails towards a horizon which has the sweetness of a summer evening, this « euphancolie » which, according to Wells, is a mixture of euphoria and melancholy.