| |
Claire Fercak |
 |
| |
|
|
| |
« Je te vois dans le foyer, la superette, la salle de réunion, le bar-tabac, le couloir, le lit, la cuisine, la chambre, tes ongles ont jauni. Je te croise, ta barbe a encore poussé, je te vois à la cantine, tes vêtements et chaussures sont de plus en plus sales, je te vois partout. »
Des circonstances accidentelles ont plongé le soigneur de ménagerie Odradek et la bibliothécaire Suzanne dans un état d’amnésie partielle, sinon un désir vital de se déprendre de leur passé. Rien ne les destinait à se rencontrer jamais. Et pourtant, au hasard de leur métamorphose, ces deux voix alternées esquissent de subtils échos, suivent à la trace des obsessions complémentaires, avant de s’oublier ensemble, au-delà des promesses de l’humaine normalité.
Histoires naturelles de l’oubli [Natural Stories from oblivion] stages two monologues from two people suffering recent traumas; both have partial amnesia or are refusing to remember. Odradek, a zoo vet, works in a menagerie. Now in part time counselling, he helps his former colleagues without being allowed to enter the cages. Over consultations with his therapist, we come to know more as he recovers snatches of memory. Plunged into a deep coma, the result of an accident in the wolf enclosure which left a colleague dead, Odradek found himself an imaginary Mongolia. On waking up, he discovered his true nature : animal. Suzanne is a librarian, she’s just lost her husband in a car crash. We discover bit by bit of the stress she suffers thanks to the users of the library, and of her disorders of perception. Since she left her daughter Muriel to be brought up by her sister, she has lived alone in the old family home.
Through these broken characters, the author tells the parallel destiny of two people caught between worlds. Odradek goes to the library to study on the Corsac – a Mongolian fox for which he developes a passion – gradualy becoming a fox himself. Meanwhile, Suzanne recognises in this dirty man the ghost of her dead husband. But how can this strange and fearful man attract a woman so obsessed by cleanliness?
Through this unexpected alliance, Claire Fercak brings to life a relationship against nature and explores how oblivion allows new freedoms and breaks barriers. In her second novel, written in lean language, two discordant voices manage by their mutual obsession to forget themselves beyond the confines of normality.
PRESS
“A text of hypnotic beauty.” (Libération - Xavier Houssin)
“A story of mad love in which the two protagonists find each other. The novel destabilizes the reader, gently but in a decided style. ” (Le Monde des livres – Florence Bouchy)
|
|
