"Puisque tu insistes, Jeudi - la veille de ton accident -, Ben est venu te donner un coup de main avec ta voiture. Sauf qu'apparemment, tu n'avais aucun problème. C'était un gentil piège."
Aïe ! Qu'avait-elle fait ? Elle se redressa, le visage en feu. Elle n'avait quand même pas fait des avances au mari de sa soeur ? (Pour commencer, ledit mari était une montagne !) Sa rupture avec Nick lui avait-elle fait perdre la tête ?
"Tu lui as offert des muffins à la banane tout juste sortis du four. Il en raffole."
Décidément...
"Avec une tonne de beurre. Le beurre, c'est niet à la maison ! Il a du cholestérol, je te rappelle. Toi qui fais super attention à ta santé."
Elle avait séduit son beau-frère avec du beurre. Son coeur battait à tout rompre.
"Et ensuite, tu lui as servi ton petit speech.
- Mon petit speech ?
- Oui, ton petit speech sur le fait qu'on devait arrêter les FIV et songer à l'adoption. Brochures, dossiers et adresses de sites à l'appui. Tu avait fait toutes les recherches."
Alice ne saisit pas tout de suite. Elle s'était imaginée filer à l'étage pour "se refaire une beauté" et réapparaître en lingerie rouge. Affreux.
"L'adoption, répéta-t-elle, l'esprit embrouillé.
- Oui. D'après toi, on devrait faire un saut dans un pays du tiers-monde et revenir avec un joli petit orphelin, comme Brad et Angelina.
- C'était très présomptueux de ma part." Sous ses airs sévères, elle tremblait de soulagement - elle n'avait pas cherché à séduire Ben. "Indiscret. Intrusif."
Cela dit, l'adoption n'était-elle pas une bonne idée ?
What Alice Forgot, Liane Moriarty/A la recherche d'Alice Love,traduction de Béatrice Taupeau chez Albin Michel, - J'ai écouté ce livre, en anglais, lu par une comédienne au délicieux accent australien.
Alice a bientôt 40 ans. Une mauvaise chute à la gym, et la voici amnésique des 10 dernières années. Pourquoi est-elle en train de divorcer de Nick, son mari adoré ? Mystère mystère. Voilà, pour l'intrigue principale.
Ecoute impec pour un grand rangement, nettoyage de printemps, faire entrer le soleil dans sa maison, et dans sa vie.
Sometimes. Less so since I moved away. To be honest I don't even mind it that much. The psychological stuff is more demoralising. I don't know how to explain it, really. I know it must sound...
He touches his hand to his forehead. His skin feels wet. She doesn't finish the sentence to explain how it must sound.
Why didn't you ever tell me about it before? he says. She says nothing. The light is dim but he can see her open eyes. Marianne, he says. The whole time we were together, why didn't you tell me any of this?
I don't know. I suppose I didn't want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you wouldn't want me anymore.
Normal People, Sally RooneyUne traduction de l'anglais (Irlande) par Stéphane Roques vient tout juste de paraître aux Éditions de l'Olivier.- Une histoire d'amour-amitié, entre premiers de la classe, sur fond de violences familiales. Ils sont amis, ils couchent ensemble, c'est intense et caché, ils se quittent se retrouvent se requittent et se reretrouvent, elle lui demande de la frapper, il refuse, il déprime, elle maigrit, et nous on s'ennuie un peu, mais on tient dans l'attente et l'espoir du happy end.
Je ne m'explique pas le succès de ce roman, best-seller vendu à plus d'un million d'exemplaires et adapté en série télévisée, si ce n'est son message positif et optimiste (que je salue). L'époque a désespérément besoin de réconfort.
I don’t want to get into a fight with you, she says.
We’re not fighting.
I know you probably hate me, but you’re the only person who actually talks to me.
I never said I hated you, he says.
That gets her attention, and she looks up. Confused, he continues looking away from her, but in the corner of his eye he still sees her watching. When he talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it “behind him. He’s not frightened of her, actually she’s a pretty relaxed person, but he fears being around her, because of the confusing way he finds himself behaving, the things he says that he would never ordinarily say.
Mrs. Wheatley had brought the magazine with her, and they spent part of the time on the plane marking the tournaments Beth would play over the next several months. They settled on one a month; Mrs. Wheatley was afraid they would run out of diseases and, as she said, "credibility" if she wrote more excuses than that. Beth wondered to herself if they shouldn't just ask for permission in a straightforward way - after all, boys were allowed to miss classes for basketball and football - but she was wise enough to say nothing. Mrs. Wheatley seemed to take immense enjoyment in doing it this way. It was like a conspiracy.
The Queen's Gambit, Walter Tevis / Le jeu de la dame sur Netflix. Et une nouvelle traduction de l'excellentissime Jacques Mailhos aux éditions Gallmeister !- Emballée par la série, j'avais spontanément écrit sur les réseaux sociaux (que j'ai désormais quittés, bon débarras) : pour ceux qui aiment le jeu d'échecs, pour ceux qui ont des filles, pour ceux qui aiment le combat, et pour tous les autres aussi et les curieux.
Et curieuse je le fus du roman dont la série est l'adaptation.
Eh bien, la série est fidèle au livre, en mieux, plus riche, plus "romanesque", et les personnages secondaires sont plus étoffés.
Les deux donnent de l'élan, réveillent l'envie, la passion.
Et la passion est contagieuse.
Le roman est plutôt pour amateurs d'échecs, et la série, tout public, est très glamour, des vêtements superbes portés par une actrice magnétique.
En ces temps ternes, cela fait un bien fou.
"Who taught you to play if they didn't want you doing it?"
"His name was Shaibel," she said, thinking of that wall of pictures in the basement. "William Shaibel. He was the janitor."
"Tell us about it," the woman from The Observer said.
"We played chess in the basement, after he taught me how."
Clearly they loved it. The man from Paris-Match shook his head, smiling. "The janitor taught you to play chess?"
"That's right," Beth said, with an involuntary tremor in her voice. "Mr. William Shaibel. He was a damn good player. He spent a lot of time at it, and he was good."
Elle imaginait une bourgade comme Mayberry dans The Andy Griffith Show : bucolique et accueillante, des femmes qui laissaient des tartes refroidir sur le rebord des fenêtres. Une ville si petite que tout le monde se connaissait. Dans une autre vie, Kennedy aurait passé des vacances d'été là-bas. Elles auraient joué devant la maison de leur grand-mère. Mais Jude éclata de rire.
"Atroce. Ils n'aiment pas les Nègres blancs. Tu te sentirais chez toi."
Elle avait parlé d'un ton si dégagé que Kennedy faillit ne pas réagir.
"Je ne suis pas noire."
Jude rit encore, cette fois plus mal à l'aise.
"Ta mère l'est.
- Et après ?
- Donc toi aussi.
- Pas du tout. Mon père est blanc, tu sais. Et tu n'as pas le droit de te pointer et de me dire qui je suis."
The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett L'autre moitié de soi, traduit par Karine Lalechère pour les éditions Autrement.- Desiree et Estelle Vignes sont nées sept minutes l'une après l'autre à Mallard, petite ville de Louisiane où tout le monde est métis à la peau claire. Leur père sera lynché sous leurs yeux par des hommes blancs. À 16 ans, en 1954, elles fuient ensemble Mallard pour la grande ville où Desiree tombera amoureuse d'un noir noir, et Stella se fera passer pour blanche et coupera les ponts avec son passé.
Un roman haletant, véritable page-turner, où l'on sent toute la tendresse et l'empathie de l'écrivaine à l'égard de ses personnages, et qui ouvre le coeur à toutes les couleurs.
She'd been caught before. Only once, the second time she'd ever pretended to be white. During her last summer in Mallard, weeds after venturing into the charm shop, she'd gone to the South Louisiana Museum of Art on an ordinary Saturday morning, not Negro Day, and walked right up to the main entrance, not the side door where Negroes lined up in the alley. Nobody stopped her, and again, she'd felt stupid for not trying this sooner. There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.
In the museum, she'd glided slowly through the rooms, studying the fuzzy Impressionists. She was listening distractedly as an elderly docent intoned to a circle of listless children, when she noticed a Negro security guard in the corner of the room staring. Then he'd winked, and, horrified, she rushed past him, head down, barely breathing until she stepped back into the bright morning. She rode the bus back to Mallard, her face burning. Of course passing wasn't that easy. Of course that colored guard recognized her. We always know our own, her mother said.
'If I shut my eyes, I could still tell you the detail of any room, and outside, the orchard and the fields and the wood with the stream running through it. I could walk blindfold and still tell you where we were. What I'm trying to say is that this is the same for all of us. This house is inside us and we shall never forget it. I think we're lucky to have somewhere so dear to remember in our hearts.'
All Change (vol. 5/5 of The Cazalet Chronicles), Elizabeth Jane Howard - Si vous avez aimé la série Downton Abbey, vous allez adorer la saga de la famille Cazalet, famille bien anglaise, bourgeoise et généreuse et ouverte et unie, qui démarre l'été 1937 (tome 1) et s'achève fin des années 50 (tome 5). C'est récréatif et éducatif, et addictif.
She turned to Jemima. 'Are you a gardener?'
'Not really. I try to keep our little patch at the back tidy, but I don't seem to have much time for more. Although,' she added, 'I suppose if I loved it I would find the time. It's a bit like people saying they don't have time to read. When, really, they simply don't want to.'
'Don't let me ever hear you say that. If you're going to make writing your life, you've got to start depending on your own judgement. You may take notice of other people, but ultimately, it's what you think is right that's right.'
'You often ask me what I think of your painting.'
'Yes, but I'd still go on doing it whatever you said.'
Casting Off (vol. 4/5 of The Cazalet Chronicles), Elizabeth Jane Howard Si vous avez aimé la série Downton Abbey, vous allez adorer la saga de la famille Cazalet, famille bien anglaise, bourgeoise et généreuse et ouverte et unie, qui démarre l'été 1937 (tome 1) et s'achève fin des années 50 (tome 5). C'est récréatif et éducatif, et addictif.
The state of London appalled him. Sandbags, boarded-up windows, dirty buildings, blistering paint - there was a general feeling of dinginess and exhaustion. People in the streets looked grey and shabby, tired as they stood patiently at bus stops in straggling queues. The conductors were women, dressed in stiff dark blue serge trouser suits. The queues daunted him - he decided not to take a bus. Every now and then there was another of the posters he had seen at the railway station, 'Is Your Journey Really Necessary?', and another that said, 'Careless Talk Costs Lives', and a third one that simply said, 'Dig For Victory' - all a bit out of date now, he should have thought.
'So what are you going to do ? I mean besides embracing new ideas?'
'I don't know. Find some sort of other boring job, I suppose.'
'Why can't you find a job and write ?'
'I don't know what to write any more.'
'What about the journal?' He knew about that, although she had never shown it to him.
'I've sort of stopped it.' She knew he knew that she had been writing it for her father.
After a pause, he said, 'Well, one of the points of a journal is that it should go on, be complete. You might as well do the whole war.'
'I don't feel like it.'
'Ha! Well, in case you don't know, one of the differences between being an amateur and a professional is that amateurs only work when they feel like it, and professionals work whatever they are feeling.'
Confusion (vol. 3/5 of The Cazalet Chronicles), Elizabeth Jane Howard - Si vous avez aimé la série Downton Abbey, vous allez adorer la saga de la famille Cazalet, famille bien anglaise, bourgeoise et généreuse et ouverte et unie, qui démarre l'été 1937 (tome 1) et s'achève fin des années 50 (tome 5). C'est récréatif et éducatif, et addictif.
I see what you mean. There's a sort of trap, isn't there? You don't tell people things out of love. But actually, I think, the more you love people, the more you should tell them - even the difficult things. I think it is the best sign of love to tell them.' She put her arms round Polly. 'You're never to bear things by yourself. Promise!' 'OK. You promise as well,' said Polly.
'I do. Any no telling is a sign of not love.'
And Polly answered in the Duchy's voice 'I do agree, my dear.'
Marking Time (vol. 2/5 of The Cazalet Chronicles), Elizabeth Jane Howard. A rude épreuve, traduction Cécile Arnaud pour les éditions de la Table Ronde- Si vous avez aimé la série Downton Abbey, vous allez adorer la saga de la famille Cazalet, famille, bien anglaise, bourgeoise et généreuse et ouverte et unie, qui démarre l'été 1937 (tome 1) et s'achève fin des années 50 (tome 5). C'est récréatif et éducatif, et addictif.
‘I’ll carry your mask if you want to take your writing,’ Polly said while they hunted in their bedroom for the cardboard boxes that contained their masks. ‘Damn! Where did we put them?’ They were still hunting when the siren went again, not wailing up and down this time, just a steady howl. ‘All Clear!’ someone shouted from the hall. ‘Must have been a false alarm,’ Teddy said; he sounded disappointed.
‘Although we wouldn’t have seen a thing buried in that awful old shelter,’ said Neville. ‘And I suppose you’ve heard, they’re using the war as an excuse not to go to the beach, which seems to me about the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’
‘Don’t be so stupid, Neville!’ Lydia said crushingly. ‘People don’t go to beaches in wartime.’
There was a generally quarrelsome feeling in the air, Polly thought, although outside it was a mellow September Sunday morning, with a smell of burning leaves from McAlpine’s bonfire, and everything looked the same. The children had all been sent away from the drawing room: the grown-ups wanted to have a talk and, naturally, everyone not classed as one resented this. ‘It isn’t as though when we’re there they make funny jokes all the time and scream with laughter,’ Neville said as they trooped into the hall. Before anyone could back him up or squash him, Uncle Rupert put his head round the drawing-room door and said, ‘Everyone who couldn’t find their masks bloody well go and find them, and in future they’re to be kept in the gun room. Chop chop.’
'Well,' he said, ‘I think if you say every night that you wish you believed in God, and there is one, he’ll hear you.'
‘I don’t wish I believed.’
‘Well, then, you could say you wish you wanted to believe. I don’t see how you can do more.’‘And the rest of the time carry on as usual?’
Anna Valenn, Le Blog
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s what ordinary life is, isn’t it? Carrying on as usual.’
‘Does that sound boring to you?’
‘It sounds it, but when you’re in it, it isn’t.’ When he kissed her she said, ‘Dad! Do you know what I love about you best? Your doubtfulness. All the things you don’t know.’ As he reached the door she called, 'It really makes me admire you.'
The Light Years (vol. 1/5 of The Cazalet Chronicles), Elizabeth Jane Howard / « Etés anglais. La saga des Cazalet I »576 pages traduites de l’anglais par Anouk Neuhoff, aux éditions de la Table Ronde- Si vous avez aimé la série Downton Abbey, vous allez adorer la saga de la famille Cazalet, famille bien anglaise, bourgeoise et généreuse et ouverte et unie, qui démarre l'été 1937 (tome 1) et s'achève fin des années 50 (tome 5). C'est récréatif et éducatif, et addictif.
Anna Valenn, Le Blog
Villy never mentioned her dancing days again, continued in her role of wife and, subsequently, mother of Louise and then Teddy and Lydia as though it had never happened. But Sybil had observed her restless energy, which, like water, streamed out in any direction it could find. She got a loom and wove linen and silk. She learned to play the zither and the flute. She learned to ride, and was soon exercising horses for the Life Guards – one of the two women in London allowed to do so. She worked for the Red Cross, took blind children to the seaside. She sailed a dinghy in small boat races.She taught herself Russian; for a short time she joined a Gjieff sect (Sybil only found out about this because Villy tried to make her join it too). Some of the crazes – like the sect – did not last long. Resisting a sudden urge to say, ‘Are you happy?’ she said, ‘I suppose the shops in Battle may be shut.’
“There they are. My brothers and sisters,” El said of the row of white and black faces in the photo. “Your foster home was integrated way back then?” “Sure was.” El turned toward her as he spoke, and the movement jostled his bandaged foot. He let out a long hiss between pursed lips. But when Barbara Jean asked if he wanted her to call for the nurse and request more pain medication, he said no. “For a long time, that house was the only place in Plainview that was mixed. The second was the Pink Slipper. Folks nobody gave a damn about were always left to mingle as they pleased, long as they didn’t try to associate with decent people."
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues / Les Suprêmes chantent le blues, Edward Kelsey Moore traduit de l'américain par Emmanuelle et Philippe Aronson publié chez Actes Sud, en Babel aussi. - C'est la suite du roman "Les Suprêmes", où l'on retrouve le talent d'Edward Kelsey Moore pour traiter de sujets douloureux, ici les ravages de la drogue, de manière chaleureuse. Une lecture distrayante, qui remplit d'espérance. Back in the 1960s, our schoolmates had started calling Barbara Jean, Clarice, and me “the Supremes” after the singing group. The more widely known Supremes had been separated by fame, acrimony, and death. But more than forty years after our trio was formed, the Plainview Supremes stood united.
At the beginning, Sue Black’s forensic work centred around identifying victims. A successful identification often helps to define a crime, and makes a criminal investigation possible. But the investigation of a crime is about much more than who’s been on the receiving end. At its heart it’s about who perpetrated the act. That’s been at the core of crime fiction since the origins of the genre in the nineteenth century. Good scientists, like good detectives, develop new techniques to overcome particular problems. If these techniques are successful they can be applied to other similar cases. For Sue Black the blazing of new trails has always been a driving force. Wherever she can, she is determined to extend the range and scope of forensic anthropology. In recent years she has spent less time working out the identities of victims than she has on nailing the victimisers.
Nick Marsh, Head of Photography for the Metropolitan Police, worked alongside Sue in Kosovo, where they became friends as well as professional confidants. After he returned to the UK, he was confronted photographic unit. A 14-year-old girl had come to the police alleging that her father was abusing her at night. She had told her mother, who hadn’t believed her. The girl knew she needed evidence. Because she was tech-savvy, she knew that a webcam would switch to recording infrared light when it is dark. The girl set up her camera, pointed it towards her bed and clicked ‘record’.
She brought the resulting video to the police. The seemingly intractable problem Nick Marsh faced was that he could see there had been abuse. But because the camera had a very narrow view, the face of the perpetrator remained out of shot. Without a face or other obvious identifying marks, the video wouldn’t be enough to convict the father.
And so Nick turned to the one person he suspected might be able to help. When she viewed the video, Sue said, ‘It was one of the spookiest things that I’ve ever seen. I felt the hair go up on the back of my neck. At about 4.15 in the morning a pair of legs came into the shot of the camera and stood there. You can see where she is lying on the bed. She is wearing her pyjamas and it is her buttock region that we can see. And he just stands there – and I know it’s a ‘he’ because of the very, very hairy legs – and then very slowly extends his forearm, puts his hand underneath the covers.’
Like Nick, Sue’s first thought was that it would be impossible to identify the abuser. But she looked more closely at the footage and noticed that the infrared light had revealed the perpetrator’s deoxygenated blood, highlighting the superficial veins on his forearm. She already knew that superficial vein patterns differ widely. The further from the heart, the more clearly differentiated they are, so the veins on the hands and the forearms are the most individual ones that our bodies display. But to identify someone on the basis of these patterns would be a forensic first. At Sue’s suggestion, the father’s right arm was photographed. The veins matched perfectly with those of the man in the video.
When the case went to court, the defence questioned the admissibility of Sue’s evidence. The judge agreed that vein pattern analysis had no track record whatsoever. The jury was cleared out so the defence and prosecution could present their arguments on whether the evidence should be allowed or not. The judge asked Sue what she planned to say. By now she had realised that she should have photographed both the father’s arms to demonstrate how forearm veins differ, even on the same individual. In a bid to make her point, she asked the judge to turn his own hands over and look at the differences in his own veins. The judge asked her if her evidence proved beyond doubt that the perpetrator was the father. ‘No,’ she said candidly. ‘I haven’t done enough research to be sure that the pattern wouldn’t match anybody else in the world.’ The defence were desperate to get the evidence thrown out. It came down to the judge. Ultimately, the judge deemed the evidence to be admissable based on Sue’s anatomical experience concerning human variation, but it certainly helped that the defence expert was an image analyst rather than an anatomist, and that he irritated the judge by not turning his mobile phone off.
Sue testifed. The defence made their case. The girl was cross-examined. The jury deliberated and came back with a verdict that Sue had not been expecting: not guilty. Worried that she had over-stepped the mark, Sue asked the prosecution barrister to check with the jury whether the science had seemed at fault to them.
If it had, vein pattern analysis as a forensic technique would have to be modified or abandoned. The verdict from the jury was that it wasn’t the science that was the issue. That had made sense to them. They’d gone with ‘not guilty’ not because they didn’t
believe the science but because they didn’t believe the girl – she hadn’t cried enough.
Forensics : The Anatomy of Crime by Val McDermid /Scènes de crime. 200 ans d'histoires et de sciences criminelles traduit de l'anglais (Écosse) par Omblage pour les éditions Les Arènes- Un traité de sciences d'investigation. Des topos clairs, illustrés par des tas d'histoires incroyables et vraies, et le tout écrit par une talentueuse auteure de polars. C'est passionnant.
and a firm reminder that truth is stranger than fiction
Our fingerprints are part of us from before birth; they first appear in the tenth week of pregnancy, when the foetus measures only 8 cm. As one of the three layers of tissue that make up the foetus’s skin – the basal layer – starts to grow at faster rate than the other two, ridges form to relieve the resulting stresses, ‘like the buckling of land masses under compression’. If your finger pads were flat, the pressure on the skin would be equal and the ridges would be parallel. But because finger pads slope, ridges form along lines of equal stress, most usually in concentric circles. Ridge patterns also appear across the palms of our hands and on the bottoms of our feet. Other primates have them, too, and evolutionary biologists believe there are good reasons for them. They help our skin to stretch and deform, protecting it from damage; they create valleys down which sweat can escape, reducing slipperiness when we hold things; and they give us more contact (and hence grip) with rough surfaces like tree bark. When we touch a surface with a finger, the ridges leave their unique pattern on it. Even the prints of identical twins differ. In all the years that fingerprinting has been practised, no one has yet found two identical clear and complete prints belonging to two different fingers.
Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby, Cigarettes After Sex
Anna Valenn, Le Blog
‘But profiling isn’t just about nailing the next Hannibal the Cannibal. It can be used in a wide variety of crimes. We’ve already had notable success in airport anti-hijacking measures, in catching drug couriers, poison-pen writers, blackmailers, serial rapists and arsonists. And just as importantly, profiling has been used very effectively to advise police officers on interview techniques for dealing with suspects in major crime enquiries. It’s not that your officers lack interviewing skills; it’s just that our clinical background means we have developed different approaches that can often be more productive than familiar techniques.’
The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid / Le chant des sirènes (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan Book 1) trad Annie Hamel, révision de trad Agnès Colomb, en format poche aux éditions J'ai Lu- Polar/thriller hard-core dans le milieu gay. Première apparition du psy profileur Tony Hill, 34 ans, aux prises avec ses propres problèmes d'ordre sexuel, appelé à collaborer avec la belle et blonde enquêtrice Carol Jordan larguée par son dernier mec, et en mal d'affection. Tous les extraits du journal du criminel décrivant les tortures infligées, toutes tortures ayant été pratiquées dans l'Histoire, j'ai lu en diagonale, pas trop mon truc, même à titre de curiosité, je m'en passe. Sinon, c'est bien ficelé, intelligent.
‘He will hit you again,’ said Susi. That detached professionalism again. No pity. No judgment. It wasn’t aquestion. She was stating a fact to move the conversation forward. ‘Yes,’ said Celeste. ‘It will happen again. He’ll hit me. I’ll hit him.’ It will rain again. I will get sick again. I will have bad days. But can’t I enjoy the good times while they last? But then why am I here at all? ‘So what I’d like to talk about is coming up with a plan,’ said Susi. She flipped over a page on her clipboard. ‘A plan,’ said Celeste. ‘A plan,’ said Susi. ‘A plan for next time.’
Anna Valenn, Le Blog
Big Little Lies / Petits secrets, grands mensonges, Liane Moriarty traduction Béatrice Taupeau pour les éditons Albin Michel ; en Livre de Poche -Un parent d'élève est mort lors de la fête de l'école maternelle de Pirriwee, sur la côte huppée. Petits secrets et grands mensonge est un page-turner, bouquin qui se dévore, dont le sujet de fond est les violences faites aux femmes et leurs conséquences sur les enfants. Il donne quelques clés pour s'en sortir. Adapté en série par OCS, je suis bien curieuse, comment étire-t-on à deux saisons un bouquin de 454 pages ?
“Mrs Lipmann: Look, I’d rather not say anything further. We deserve to be left in peace. A parent is dead. The entire school community is grieving.
Gabrielle: Hmmm, I wouldn’t say the entire school community is grieving. That might be a stretch.”
She always pretended to herself that she didn’t let Lauren help because she was trying to be the perfect mother-in-law, but really, when you didn’t let a woman help, it was a way of keeping her at a distance, of letting her know that she wasn’t family, of saying, ‘I don’t like you enough to let you into my kitchen.’
The Husband's Secret / Le Secret du mari, Liane Moriarty traduit par Béatrice Taupeau pour les éditons Albin Michel ; en Livre de Poche - On ne s'ennuie pas à lire Le Secret du mari de l'australienne Liane Moriarty. Ça se lit comme on regarde une (bonne) série américaine (efficace) sur le thème du couple et de la famille, il se passe tout le temps quelque chose.
Maybe Mum was right, she thought hazily. It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. They could fall in love with fresh new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of ‘otherness’, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip off down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; because how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or tritest of fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.
I sat on the bed, my pack in my lap. I wasn’t tired anymore. What I did sometimes when I couldn’t sleep was write postcards in my head to all the people I’d ever known. I wrote to my old man even though he was dead, to my mother in Guatemala, to my aunt in Austin, to Uncle Harry, to Rosalia, who was my girlfriend from before I left Brooklyn, and to plenty of others. I imagined myself sitting down at a table with a blue pen. I’m not sure where the table was. I imagined sitting there with a stack of cards and I saw it like in a movie: the pen moving, words forming. My handwriting in my imagination was much better than it was in real life. I heard the words in voiceover, too. That also felt like a movie. I didn’t recognize the voice reading them. It was kind of sad and flat. The postcards were never long. Just how are you and do you remember the time and I’m okay kind of stuff. Now I was writing one to my mother, saying I was back in the old neighborhood and what was Guatemala like and did she have a job yet.
My eyes were closed. I guessed I wouldn’t sleep all night. I wrote more postcards and then I thought about going outside. I wondered if Roy-Roy’s was open for a falafel or if it was even still around. I’d go there all the time with my mom when I was a kid. She liked anything that wasn’t Italian. Middle Eastern. Vietnamese. Indian. Anything that felt exotic. Roy-Roy’s was just okay falafels and fries, but it was a place that felt familiar. I doubted anything was open. I didn’t even know what time it was. It had to be the middle of the night. I didn’t know if Magnuson had arrived or how long he would be around. I got up and went out into the hallway. It was warmer. I sat down near a heat pipe. I could hear the heat coming up in the pipe and that was one of my least favorite sounds. I saw a roach on the floor at the end of the hall. It was the size of a mouse. I couldn’t sleep in the hall. I went back downstairs and poked around, thinking maybe I’d find a short dog of wine Uncle Harry or Holdout had stashed somewhere. One of the lights in the hallway was flickering. I could still hear the heat coming up. On top of that, I heard fucking noises from behind one of the doors. I couldn’t tell which door, and they weren’t normal fucking noises. The woman wasn’t moaning, wasn’t saying anything that you say during sex. What she was doing was kind of a prolonged grunt. It sounded like she was passing a kidney stone. And the guy, he was just whooping. Over and over. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
Death Don't Have No Mercy, a collection of 8 storiesby William Boyle- Recueil de huit nouvelles noires. Pas encore traduites en français, elles devraient. En anglais, la langue de William Boyle est un régal pour l'oreille et l'imagination. Huit petits films. Des mecs ratés et leurs choix, une ambiance, des odeurs, des surprises, une tension. C'est violent. Ici loufoque (Poughkeepsie), là émouvant (Here Come the Bells), et divertissant.
But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points’, one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
The Remains of the Day / Les Vestiges du jour, Kazuo Ishiguro ; traduit de l'anglais par Sophie Mayoux aux Presses de la Renaissance, et en folio. Kazuo Ishiguro est prix Nobel de littérature. - Mr Stevens est majordome, trente-cinq ans au dévoué service de Lord Darlington auquel il faisait une confiance aveugle. Lord Darlington tombe en disgrâce après guerre, et à sa mort, Darlington Hall est racheté par un américain, majordome inclus. Mr Stevens reçoit une lettre de Miss Kenton, son ancienne collègue, lui annonçant qu'elle quitte son mari. Il entreprend un petit périple automobile pour la revoir. Ce voyage est l'occasion d'une introspection de Mr Stevens sur sa carrière, et sa vie, son histoire d'amour manquée. Bouleversant. (Et matière à réflexion sur la notion de dignité.)
Et l'adaptation cinématographique par James Ivory avec Anthony Hopkins et Emma Thomson, et dans un petit rôle, charming Hugues Grant, et aussi Lena Headey (la Cersei de GoT) est superbe.
Ten minutes or so later came the sound of another car and I opened the door to Herr Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador, by now no stranger to Darlington Hall. His lordship emerged to meet him and the two gentlemen appeared to exchange complicit glances before disappearing together into the drawing room. When a few minutes later I was called in to provide refreshments, the four gentlemen were discussing the relative merits of different sorts of sausage, and the atmosphere seemed on the surface at least quite convivial. Thereafter I took up my position out in the hall – the position near the entrance arch that I customarily took up during important meetings – and was not obliged to move from it again until some two hours later, when the back door bell was rung. On descending, I discovered a police constable standing there with Miss Kenton, requesting that I verify the latters identity. ‘Just security, miss, no offence meant,’ the officer muttered as he wandered off again into the night.
