THE MORNING LIST
This week, novels are in the spotlight. Yiyun Li probes the elusiveness of words and beings, when Laura Alcoba embraces the backwash of memory to bring out a buried Argentinian childhood. Claire North, for her part, stages a supernatural game on a planetary scale. Philippe Ridet launches two friends into the whirlwind of life. As for essays, Achille Mbembe analyzes the global challenges of life.
NOVEL. “Leaving Anyway” by Yiyun Li
An octogenarian in a retirement home. A woman of a sacred caliber, this Lilia! She buried three husbands and raised five children. But, of the five, only one girl seems to count in his memory. This is Lucy, who committed suicide at the age of 27, two months following the birth of her baby Katherine. She left this simple note: “Thank you for taking care of the baby for me, I’m too tired. »
At the twilight of her life, Lilia, speaking in particular to Katherine, looks back on the past. To better understand Lucy – “There is always something that makes people strangers to each other” – she reads and rereads the diary of a certain Roland Bouley, who was once her lover for a few evenings and – he doesn’t know it – Lucy’s real father.
Deftly alternating addresses to Katherine, which are actually monologues, with pages from Roland’s diary, Leave anyway does not mention China. But we find there all the great themes of Yiyun Li: the indelible mark of the past, the impossible communication between beings, the couple, the weight of History. And the suicidal act, which Yiyun Li not only does not judge, but surrounds with a form of unpitied gentleness.
Finally, there is this form of resentment towards words which are, “among what we cannot afford to lose, the most uselessdit Lilia. The gardener that I have always been can guarantee you one thing: few are [ceux] which deserve to be cultivated”. But, in the end, “we only have these weeds of words to cling to”. Fl. N.
PHILOSOPHY. “The Earthly Community”, by Achille Mbembe
Thinking regarding community beyond identity and the state, at a time when the impulse to withdraw into oneself is renewed: this is the subject of Achille Mbembe’s new essay. In line with his previous works, in particular Brutalism (The Discovery, 2020), “The Earth Community, writes the author, takes up, almost brick by brick, a number of fundamental intuitions. and enriches them with a dense reflection on the living and the technological, blurring the boundaries between subject and object, living and artificial.
You have 67.58% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
