Belinda Cannone
Belinda Cannone est romancière et essayiste. Elle a publié sept romans (le dernier, Nu intérieur, aux éditions de L’Olivier) et plusieurs essais dont L’Écriture du désir...
Le don du passeur
Auteur
Parution :
21/08/2013
Collection :
La Bleue
THE FERRYMAN'S GIFT
“When someone dies, we can finally gauge who they were. My father is more like a character from a novel than some real life person: I’ve never met anyone so ill-equipped for a life as a member of society. But I’ve decided to write this portrait of him rather than a family memoir because the interesting thing is that, by being so very unusual, he really did exist. His very individuality lends him a universal dimension.
What we inherit from our parents, and this is far more difficult to shake off than their ideas, is their affects, those powerful living and evolving emotions that they transmit and we receive quite unwittingly and irrevocably. Since he died, I have often thought of myself as my father’s right hand armed with a pen.
In this book I have tried to capture what has been passed on to me, my inheritance of affect-ideas which I, in turn, am striving to pass on through my writing.”
The Ferryman’s Gift is a unique book with great complexity beneath its apparent simplicity. It is neither essay nor memoir, but a wonderful portrait of a father who is no longer with us.
Belinda Cannone is a novelist and essayist. She has published six novels and several essays, including L’Écriture du désir (Winner of the 2001 Académie française prize for an essay) and Le Sentiment d’imposture (winner of the 2005 Grand Prix for an essay from the Société des Gens de Lettres). Her last book, La Chair du temps, was published by Stock in 2012.
« En écrivant ce livre sur mon père, j’ai découvert que ce que nous recueillons de nos parents, et dont il est beaucoup plus difficile de se débarrasser que de leurs idées, ce sont leurs affects, vivante et palpitante matière transmise à leur insu et au nôtre, irrémédiablement. On connaît, sans mots, sans discours, intuitivement, les cordes et les accords blessés, les joies aussi, sur lesquels ils sont bâtis et qui fournissent, par legs inconscient, notre ossature. Puis on passe une vie à essayer de s’en accommoder. J’ai toujours été bouleversée, et cela est vrai pour mes deux parents, de si bien savoir, pour l’avoir constamment éprouvé, ce qu’ils sentaient. Et – tant pis pour l’air de sentimentalisme – il y a (avait) une telle beauté, alliée à la fragilité, dans ce monde affectif et moral, que je ne peux cesser d’en avoir le coeur étreint. »
160 pages
Format :
135 x 220 mm
EAN :
9782234074712
Prix :
16.00 €
