A noticed debut novel “La dérobée” by Sophie de Baere at Anne Carrière!
A love story, a love triangle, or more precisely, two parallel couples where physical sensations marry with the spirit and vice versa, just like “the sharp beauty of doubt and distance” that the man of her life inspires in her.
The story of Claire Lemas spans three periods of her life, from a love-struck teenager who wisely marries a man from Nice, to becoming a dreamy young grandmother, still sensitive to the charm of the artist, photographer Antoine.
Unspoken words, messages, complicities: “the still waters discover the crack through which they spread and, in my insides, they pour out in sudden and delightful jolts.” It is the sorrowful life of a sensitive young girl seeking a world away from her parents, indifferent to each other. Two worlds coexisted, as the heroine says, the bleak everyday life of the provinces and these meetings in enigmatic places with this ideal young man, “wrapped in the absoluteness of their feelings.”
Confidences, sensations, hard-to-admit truths about couple life, secrets of love upsetting all logical directions. Furthermore, this story is punctuated by dramas intimately linked to the relationship of our two protagonists, dramas that unravel throughout explorations into the depths of the soul, of investigations. “The quartz of childhood left us little by little.”
Sensations linked to space, to materials, to Nature. Realization, maturity do not take away this sweet dream built early on that never leaves the lovers, who reunite 26 years later, living just a few floors apart, each with their own family.
A novel full of subtlety. It is not about the confusion of feelings by Stefan Zweig but the deepening of them, which cross time and are protean in nuance.
United by a common revolt against their respective situations, although not belonging to the same social class, he “despises his family,” she, although a shadow of herself, without him, will lead a peaceful life, paradoxically, resembling her parents. Could there be transmission in life choices? And yet, she wanted to “chip away at the varnish that connected her to their condition and toss the shavings behind her.”
What traverses these “epochs,” as they say of great novels, is the imperishable emotion he evokes with the return to grace of his protégé, prompting us to wish to share this rare and quality excitement. He would “make my body tremble, make my voice crackle.” “I feel like I am living a foamy, entertaining reality, semi-fictional.”
That’s what one feels in this well-constructed novel where the events accelerate, chosen to be commended by the Anne Carrière editions. Not bad for a debut novel! 250 intoxicating pages, with surprising twists. A very sensory writing style.
One suspects some autobiographical notes in this author, Sophie de Baere, in her forties, schoolteacher, also in Nice. Happy reading!
by Roland Haugade
