Medieval Calais, threats in Naples, meeting in Moscow… Our reading choices
THE MORNING LIST
This week, our selection invites you to travel to the Europe of the Hundred Years’ War with James Meek, to reconnect with childhood thanks to Vincent Delecroix, to discover in comics the life under surveillance of Roberto Saviano, to go to the meeting Ossip Mandelstam and Ho Chi Minh thanks to Linda Lê, and discovering “the perfect girl” according to Nathalie Azoulai.
ROMAN. “Towards Calais, in Ordinary Times”, by James Meek
England, 1348. Ten years earlier, at the Battle of Crécy, English archers routed “those devils of French who had burned Portsmouth”. Still crowned with this glory, they left the Cotswolds here, to the west of Oxford, and marched towards Calais, now an English city, where one of them, the brave Hacket, took possession of the manor received as a reward for his bravery. So begins the fourth translated novel by Scotsman James Meek, To Calais, in ordinary times.
With the archers walk the pretty Cees, a Frenchwoman “delighted” (robbed and raped) at the siege of Mantes, a confessor, a freed serf and Dame Bernadine, a gentle daughter of a knight, fallen into ” in love “ for Hacket and fleeing an arranged marriage. But now, when this company is about to cross the English Channel, an unexpected enemy comes to meet it. The Black Death. The great plague of 1348 which will send ad patres nearly half of Europe.
Transposing in the middle of the XIVand century his favorite themes – the exploration of the heart and its enigmas, desire, death, the double aspiration of man to destruction and to poetry… –, James Meek offers here a reflection on the way in which the the story is told. The myth of the “great victory”, the making of the “hero” in times of war, the different stories of men and women: his text is conceived as a joust. A tournament where the arrows of Eros and those of the archers intersect, under the sly gaze of the Grim Reaper.
Often funny, tasty like the language of the Middle Ages, stimulating like the romance of the rose, the great best-seller of the Middle Ages, James Meek’s story offers above all, implicitly, an art of living and loving “courteously”, much less “feudal” than it seems. Florence Noville
PHILOSOPHY. “Their childhood”, by Vincent Delecroix
Scarcely have we traced the word “child” that we are already threatened by infantilism. Or by the great metaphysics soaring on this age of beginnings which would hold the key to origins. The great strength of Vincent Delecroix in Their childhood, the sweet solidity of his book, is to refuse these easy paths.
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