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Aliona Gloukhova |
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Prix Murat. Université de Bari. Un roman Français pour l'Italie 2019
« Je ne sais pas si Istanbul garde toujours les traces de ce qui s’est passé, je ne sais pas si je peux apprendre d’autres choses sur mon père. Ou peut-être le sais-je, mais je fais comme si je pouvais encore faire durer son histoire, je me mets à sa place et je suis toutes les pistes, même les fausses. »
Le 7 novembre 1995, alors qu’elle a onze ans, Aliona apprend que son père a disparu lors du naufrage d’un voilier au large de la Turquie. Contre-enquête initiatique menée à partir des lambeaux de souvenirs de la petite fille devenue adulte, ce roman ausculte l’impalpable attente, tout en inventant un destin à cet homme absent. |
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Aliona Gloukhova’s brief novel is inspired by a tragic event that occurred on November 7th, 1995, when her father disappeared in the shipwreck of a sailboat during a storm off the Turkish coast, his body never recovered. She was eleven then and lived in Byelorussia. The point of the novel is to conduct a literary investigation, starting with the fragments of memories of the little girl who is now an adult. Did “Papka” drown, he who was such a good swimmer ? Did he prefer to run away from a life that had become too boring, abandoning three children and a beloved wife to their own fate ?
With alternative approaches – intimate, with a distance, or imaginary – the author auscultates the impalpable expectations, highlighting, the gaps in this story, to make the silences speak all the better. Mixing reveries with suppositions, Aliona dissects each detail, illustrates without ever putting a name on it the impossibility of finding closure, but also her need to recapture, in return, a place for herself.
The crystalline poetry of this autobiographical debut novel is also due to the balance between what is said and unsaid, always on the ridgeline of a French that, while it is not her maternal tongue, becomes a moving letter to the missing father.
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“A first novel, beautiful and just. ”
Livres Hebdo
“A narrow novel, led to the first person with a peculiarity and a mastery we can only greet.”
Le Figaro Magazine
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