Code EAN / ISBN: 9782234060852
Code HACHETTE: 5460852
Retail price: 20,99 €
Publication date: 08/2009
Dimensions: 215 x 135 mm
Number of pages: 396
Copyright © Editions Stock, 2009
Le rêve entouré d'eau
Bernard Chapuis
Le prix des Deux Magots 2010
A summer’s night, beside the water. Drinking, smoking. The conversation lingers over specific objects that have marked various individuals, and have gradually been erased as their lives went on. Lost things, dreams with no tomorrows. Sometimes the dreams and the long-lost objects do have elements of reality. An Indian horseman’s saddle, a bed made of precious wood, a Tuareg sword and a Japanese pine tree loom up out of oblivion where they were secretly waiting to be remembered.
This might have been inconceivable had the ethnologist Julien Cézat not died in a flying accident in 1996, and if his friends had not adopted and raised his four children as part of an extended “clan” with a fertile imagination. Talbeau, a major international lawyer, finances the clan and its expeditions. Valentine, aged sixty-nine, takes on the role of matriarch for which she was utterly unprepared. She sets off to see an ageing cousin in Switzerland and reclaim the wooden bed bequeathed to her by her father and snatched from the clutches of the Nazis. She comes back with two cats and accompanied by Luca, a beguiling photographer in his seventies, and Bichot, a professional without a profession. The latter reappears in the Sahara alongside Julien Cézat’s son Armand, who has never stopped thinking about a sword given to his father by one of the last Tuaregs, and buried in the desert for thirty years.
The vague and unfocused Bichot accompanies the reader from the first line to the last, sometimes amusing and sometimes touching with his bouts of silence and his hesitation. He succeeds in his final aimless journey, searching for a Japanese pine and a beloved woman.
Bernard Chapuis introduces us to a new clan, and - as with La vie parlée and Vieux garçon - it is one made up of unshakeable ties, a reconstituted family and a lifetime’s friendships. The characters in this clan in A Dream Surrounded by Water tread a fine line between elegance and humour.
Bernard Chapuis is the author of five novels. In 2005 he was awarded the Prix Roger Nimier for La vie parlée.
A summer’s night, beside the water. Drinking, smoking. The conversation lingers over specific objects that have marked various individuals, and have gradually been erased as their lives went on. Lost things, dreams with no tomorrows. Sometimes the dreams and the long-lost objects do have elements of reality. An Indian horseman’s saddle, a bed made of precious wood, a Tuareg sword and a Japanese pine tree loom up out of oblivion where they were secretly waiting to be remembered.
This might have been inconceivable had the ethnologist Julien Cézat not died in a flying accident in 1996, and if his friends had not adopted and raised his four children as part of an extended “clan” with a fertile imagination. Talbeau, a major international lawyer, finances the clan and its expeditions. Valentine, aged sixty-nine, takes on the role of matriarch for which she was utterly unprepared. She sets off to see an ageing cousin in Switzerland and reclaim the wooden bed bequeathed to her by her father and snatched from the clutches of the Nazis. She comes back with two cats and accompanied by Luca, a beguiling photographer in his seventies, and Bichot, a professional without a profession. The latter reappears in the Sahara alongside Julien Cézat’s son Armand, who has never stopped thinking about a sword given to his father by one of the last Tuaregs, and buried in the desert for thirty years.
The vague and unfocused Bichot accompanies the reader from the first line to the last, sometimes amusing and sometimes touching with his bouts of silence and his hesitation. He succeeds in his final aimless journey, searching for a Japanese pine and a beloved woman.
Bernard Chapuis introduces us to a new clan, and - as with La vie parlée and Vieux garçon - it is one made up of unshakeable ties, a reconstituted family and a lifetime’s friendships. The characters in this clan in A Dream Surrounded by Water tread a fine line between elegance and humour.
Bernard Chapuis is the author of five novels. In 2005 he was awarded the Prix Roger Nimier for La vie parlée.
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