At the Toulouse polars du Sud festival, Claire Favan probes the drama of foster children
The Toulouse polars du Sud festival continues all weekend at the La Renaissance bookstore in Toulouse. Among the many authors present, Claire Favan.
Revealed by the powerful diptych “Intimate Killer” and “Shadow Killer”, which recalled a fine harvest of awards, Claire Favan is one of the most prominent feathers in French crime fiction. She returns to the Toulouse Polars du sud festival – her fourth participation – to present “From nowhere” (HarperCollins Noir, 379 pages, €20.90), a captivating and intense thriller around the themes of twinning and, above all, drama. substitute children.
“The twins are a great classic of the thriller, observe the novelist. Literature is full of them; what matters is how you treat it. It’s no mystery, and I reveal it at the end of the book: my family had a similar story, of twins abandoned at birth. One was adopted by a rich family, the other by a poor family. The day the latter got married, a luxury car stopped in front of his home and an attorney suggested that he renounce the marriage and leave with him, find his twin and recover his rights to the family fortune. He chose to marry and we, who were on his side, remained poor! This astonishing story, of which Amoro, in Veneto, is the setting, Claire appropriated it to write this abundant novel which, beyond the relationship between the twins Tony and Raf, is a cry of revolt against homes.
Strong and poignant
“When I put Tony in a foster home, I started to find out about the matter and the more I dug the more I discovered a horrifying reality. I came across monstrous things and I said to myself that I had to talk about them. I was moved, but I didn’t want to be miserable. These children experience abuse, rape, prostitution. They are survivors, attributable to a suppressed part of humanity. Many end up in psychiatry,” says Claire Favan. The scenes are, necessarily, very strong and poignant; the dialogues of remarkable precision and accuracy. And black – very black. Raf, the twin stranded in a wealthy family, is also destroyed, and the relationship between him and his father is also masterfully narrated. “Everything comes from childhood, insists the native of Paris. The society we invent a destiny that shapes us. Tony is a monster created by the system and he struggles day by day, he fights to get to the next day. By claiming to grow up far from parents who have been rightly denounced, we have not protected them. This system supposed to protect them destroys them even more. We don’t come out of this book unscathed and the characters – the twins, but also the friend Chris and all the others – continue to haunt the reader long after turning the last page. An important, must-read book.
Toulouse Polars du sud, until Sunday October 9 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., at the Forum de la Renaissance (3, rue Georges-Vivent, metro Basso-Cambo), Toulouse. Free admission. Complete program on www.toulouse-polars-du-sud.com