The narrator resembles Vassilis Alexakis. He tells his story to a woman he knows well, and whom he needs to tell it to. He likes to send her news of the world as well as descriptions of more intimate events, concerning his family and himself, his love life, his children. Little by little, ten years of personal and general history unravel. It is the marking events making up ten years of his life that the man confides to the absent-one. He speaks to her softly, as if she could hear him; sometimes he thinks he has seen her, that he has just passed her in the street.
Progressively, we understand that Alexakis is talking to his mother, whom he has in fact lost. That event was the most important in his life. There was no reason not to continue the dialogue however, even when the news are not so good.
How to explain to his lost mother that her husband, the narrator’s father, has also died? This revelation comes at the end, last but one amongst the book’s secrets.
All the themes essential to his work are woven in this new novel by the author of La Langue maternelle and Mots étrangers. Day after Day is a funny and tragic book, a universal work.
Vassilis Alexakis has lived in Paris and Athens since 1968. He has published fifteen books, including Talgo, Paris-Athènes, Avant, La langue maternelle (Prix Médicis) and Les Mots étrangers.
L'auteur
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