Under option in The Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Brazil
Having reached the age of forty, the narrator feels an urge to learn a new language, but with no professional, cultural or travel-related goal. The reasons driving her are far more fundamental: she wants to feel in detail the exact sensations of a language naturally inscribing itself in her body and nourishing it deep down, thereby consolidating every aspect of her person.
She meets a teacher of Russian, Yuri, who has absolutely no trouble grasping the purpose of her undertaking. He adapts his teaching methods to the pupil very freely and with a generous degree of inventiveness, without losing sight of his own peculiar stringency. Thanks to this increasingly intimate and magnetic relationship, both characters have a great variety of experiences rooted in the spoken word and, as the lessons progress, the heroine sees a new maturity building inside herself.
“Russia’s so close,” she thinks as she gradually succumbs to her teacher’s language. With each passing session, the adventure goes on. An unusual erotic adventure. One of love? the emotion that emerges over the seasons is an indicator that it is better not to answer that question.
Florence Ehnuel, born in 1966, came to writing in 2004 with L’amour conjugué (La Martinière), in which she endeavours to use her philosophical education to express her most intimate experiences. She pursued this project further in En amour sommes-nous des femmes ? (Le Pommier, 2006) and Le beau sexe des hommes (Seuil, 2007), which has been translated into four languages.
L'auteur
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