Lydie Salvayre

Lola Lafon

Lauren Bastide

Pauline Harmange

Ovidie

Maboula Soumahoro

Iris Brey

Alice Coffin

Camille Froidevaux-Metterie

Juliette Armanet

Estelle-Sarah Bulle

Rébecca Chaillon

Jeanne Cherhal

Kiyémis

Fatima Ouassak

Longtemps laissé en sommeil, le concept de sororité a refait surface avec le mouvement #Metoo : être soeurs, c'est être, ensemble, plus fortes. Envisagée comme outil de pouvoir féminin, la sororité nous invite à repenser ce que signifie être une femme aujourd'hui, à questionner les rapports de domination et à imaginer le monde de demain. Sous forme de récits, fictions, textes réflexifs, poèmes et chansons, ce collectif, dirigé par la romancière Chloé Delaume, appelle à une solidarité qui ne nie pas les différences mais embrasse la diversité. Car c’est grâce à la sororité, véritable parole en acte, que la révolution féministe adviendra. Sous la direction de : Chloé Delaume Avec les textes de : Juliette Armanet, Lauren Bastide, Iris Brey, Estelle-Sarah Bulle, Rébecca Chaillon, Jeanne Cherhal, Alice Coffin, Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, Kiyémis, Lola Lafon, Fatima Ouassak, Ovidie, Lydie Salvayre et Maboula Soumahoro

Sororité

Ben Faccini

Cry, Mother Spain

La 4e de couverture indique : « Deux voix entrelacées. Celle, révoltée, de Georges Bernanos, témoin direct de la guerre civile espagnole, qui dénonce la terreur exercée par les nationalistes avec la bénédiction de l'Eglise catholique contre les " mauvais pauvres ". Son pamphlet, Les Grands cimetières sous la lune, fera bientôt scandale. Celle, roborative, de Montse, mère de la narratrice et " mauvaise pauvre ", qui, soixante-dix ans après les événements, a tout gommé de sa mémoire, hormis les jours radieux de l'insurrection libertaire par laquelle s'ouvrit la guerre de 36 dans certaines régions d'Espagne, des jours que l'adolescente qu'elle était vécut dans la candeur et l'allégresse dans son village de Haute Catalogne. Deux paroles, deux visions qui résonnent étrangement avec notre présent, comme enchantées par l'art romanesque de Lydie Salvayre, entre violence et légèreté, entre brutalité et finesse, portées par une prose tantôt impeccable, tantôt joyeusement malmenée. »

roman

Pas pleurer

La vita comune

Everyday Life

Nada de Lágrimas

Non piangere

Warren Motte

Lydie Salvayre, Maintenant Même

The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties. But the humor is undercut by a sadness, a sense of defeat that makes this slim novel resonate with the injustice of our increasingly impersonal, corporate world.

"One of the oddest characters in contemporary fiction, the lecturer can't help but digress about his sad life in the midst of his speech, although he's too self-deluded to realize quite how sad it is. Salvayre's The Lecture is an example of political double-talk and misogyny run wild."--Jacket.

The Lecture

Sept femmes. Sept figures emblématiques de la littérature qui ont follement investi leur vie. Leur relation à l'écriture est passionnelle, et, pour certaines d'entre elles, les a conduit au suicide. Singulières et exigeantes, elles transcendent leur douleur personnelle dans l'oeuvre. Leur rapport au quotidien, qu'elles considèrent médiocre et sans intérêt, est vécu comme tragique. Mais ce "quotidien" n'est-il pas aujourd'hui celui qui a marqué l'Histoire ? Celui du Paris d'avant-guerre, des Années folles, de la Russie stalinienne... Comment retranscrire une oeuvre au travers de la vie même de son auteur ? Lydie Salvayre s'adonne à cet exercice de portraitiste, comme l'ont déjà magnifiquement réussi Cioran et Sainte-Beuve, en choisissant celles dont la lecture a marqué sa vie et par là-même fécondé son oeuvre : Emily Brönte (1818-1848), Colette (1873-1954), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) et Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Dérangeantes, scandaleuses, elles ont témoigné à leur façon du monde dont elles ont autant souffert qu'elles ont contribué à la façonner... Leurs oeuvres sont désormais des monuments littéraires. Lydie Salvayre les fait revivre en écrivant leur histoire, leur beauté, leur démesure, leur rébellion mais aussi leur côté sombre et leur désespérance.

7 femmes

Aged fifteen, as Franco's forces begin their murderous purges and cities across Spain rise up against the old order, Montse has never heard the word fascista before. In any case, the villagers say facha (the ch is a real Spanish ch, by the way, with a real spit). Montse lives in a small village, high in the hills, where few people can read or write and fewer still ever leave. If everything goes according to her mother's plan, Montse will never leave either. She will become a good, humble maid for the local landowners, muchísimas gracias, with every Sunday off to dance the jota in the church square. But Montse's world is changing. Her brother José has just returned from Lérida with a red and black scarf and a new, dangerous vocabulary and his words are beginning to open up new realms to his little sister. She might not understand half of what he says, but how can anyone become a maid in the Burgos family when their head is ringing with shouts of Revolución, Comunidad and Libertad? The war, it seems, has arrived in the nick of time.

When a process-server arrives at a housing project on the edge of Paris to draw up a routine inventory of goods in view of seizure, the reception he receives from distrainees Rose Melie and her teenage daughter Louisiane is more than he has bargained for. Rose, forever unhinged by the trauma of a childhood spent under Nazi occupation, mistakes him for a collaborationist thug and assails him with her alternately tragic and hilarious memories of Vichy France. Louisiane, for her part, treats the process-server to an exaggerated display of courtesy laced with precocious classical erudition and a stream of late-pubescent revelations. In a narrative that lurches giddily between 1942 and 1997, Lydie Salvayre picks at the sores of recent French history, impertinently exposing continuities of authoritarianism. In Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers--a short piece also included in this book--the author grants the process-server a right of reply, which he uses to chilling effect.

Followed by Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-servers

The Company of Ghosts

« Pourquoi, Monsieur, expliquez-moi pourquoi, vous moquez-vous de votre Quichotte lorsqu’il ne s’accommode pas de ce qu’on appelle, pour aller vite, la réalité ? » Une femme d’aujourd’hui interpelle Cervantes, génial inventeur de Don Quichotte, dans une suite de quinze lettres. Tour à tour ironique, cinglante, cocasse, tendre, elle dresse l’inventaire de ce que le célèbre écrivain espagnol a fait subir de mésaventures à son héros pourfendeur de moulins à vent. Convoquant ainsi l’auteur de toute une époque pour mieux parler de la nôtre, l’autrice de Pas pleurer brosse le portrait de l’homme révolté par excellence, animé par le désir farouche d’agrandir une réalité étroite et inique aux dimensions de son rêve de justice. Un livre-manifeste, autant qu’un vibrant hommage à un héros universel et à son créateur.

Rêver debout

Deux femmes, la mère et la fille, vivent recluses dans un petit appartement. Survient, Maître Échinard, un huissier de justice chargé de procéder à l’inventaire de leurs biens avant saisie. Et c’est l’affolement.La mère, Rose, voit aussitôt dans cet intrus un milicien aux ordres de Darnand. C’est pour elle le monde s’est arrêté en 43, l’Occupation dure encore, et Darnand, Pétain et les autres sont encore là. D’ailleurs elle leur parle, sans arrêt. Et les insulte, abondamment.La fille, Louisiane, se bouche les oreilles. Les élucubrations de sa mère, ses éclats, ses fracas, les spectres avec lesquels elle dispute jour et nuit, les injures jetées au Maréchal qu’elle appelle Putain, tout cela l’exaspère.Devant l’homme de loi impassible, les deux femmes vont se livrer à de furieux soliloques et tisser le récit, aussi hilarant que monstrueux, de leurs batailles et de leurs douleurs, de leur mémoire et de leur peur.

La Compagnie des spectres

Jane Kuntz

The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the questions—and answers them. While ranting on to the court about various topics—his family, the museum where he works as a tour guide, and even the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal—the narrator of The Power of Flies reveals himself to be both calculating and unstable. In this latest novel from acclaimed French writer Lydie Salvayre, it is up to the reader to sort through his philosophical diatribe to discover why this man turned killer. "Salvayre's work applies a cheerful irony to very dark preoccupations: chiefly the connection between political repression and family horrors, and the male sickness of authoritarianism. . . . Salvayre is a writer with a mission."London Review of Books "There are innocuous books that charm you, gently surprise you at moments you didn't expect, blissfully put you to sleep, make you dream of princes and princesses. . . . But there are others, like Lydie Salvayre's novels, that make you sit up and take notice, that directly confront you, that shake you up from the very first sentence, warning you that the test is going to be brutal, the dream is going to be dark, and the princess's smile is going to be painful."Le Monde,/P> "Never a false note. . . . One of France's most virtuosic young novelists."Publishers Weekly "A Parisian museum tour guide descends into madness and murder, guided by the works of the philosopher Blaise Pascal, in this distinctive novel published in France in 1995. Salvayre (The Company of Ghosts) has constructed a bleak character study through which she examines the nature of criminality and the way the past conspires to consume our souls. The narrator, held for the murder of an unnamed victim, reveals his story in conversations with the judge, a psychiatrist, and a guard in the jail's infirmary. Through anecdotes about his workplace (the abbey at Port-Royal des Champs, associated with Pascal and the Jansenist movement) and his failing marriage and his memories of a dismal childhood, we see a man struggling 'to gain a foothold in the void.' Ruminations on the futility of existence place this squarely in the tradition of the French existentialists: in a nod to Camus, the narrator's cellmate is in jail for "killing an Arab." There are also echoes of Don Quixote in the flashes of absurd humor and the theme of a man led to his destruction by overzealous reading. Throughout, Salvayre handles this ambitious framework with great sangfroid. Recommended for literary fiction collections."Library Journal "A madmans intense soliloquy in a slim, powerful volume by French author Salvayre (Everyday Life, 2006, etc.). The novel opens in a courtroom, where a former museum tour guide stands trial for murder. The accused engages in one-sided debates with his judge, prison guard, lawyer and psychiatrist. The nameless voice remains the novels sole speaker, and though his rants prove that he is not only neurotic but mentally unbalanced, he is surprisingly eloquent and darkly humorous. We soon learn that the narrators childhood haunts him: Abused by his angry father, he grew up in a house of violence, fear and hatred. He came to find a father figure in his museum boss, but was crushed when his mentor didnt understand and eventually refused to tolerate his erratic behavior. He is obsessed with his selfless, protective, now-dead mother, and is unable to love any other woman. He had a malfunctioning relationship with his wife, verbally and physically abusive, yet she continued to love him—a fact that irritated him to no end. The condemned mans mocking descriptions of social norms and everyday actions (sex, sneezing) is humorous, and his tone, lacking fear and timidity, can be captivating. The accused may be neurotic, self-involved, snobbish and unlikable, but the questions he raises are universal. What is pre-ordained and what is self-willed? How does one 'gain a foothold in the void'? How much sympathy does one owe his fellow man? Well-composed and provocative."Kirkus

Lydie Salvayre

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