El aniversario

Can one abandon one's father and mother? Can one slam the door, walk down the stairs, and decide never to see them again? Question one's origins, escape their control? After a decade of voluntary estrangement from his parents, a son finally decides to look back and tell his family's story with "the brutal force of the novel." He thus commemorates a heartbreaking anniversary: ​​without accusing or redeeming, with a tone that is "scandalously serene," in the words of Emmanuel Carrère. The result is a portrait of a family ravaged by the patriarch's omnipresent violence; a lucid and desolate portrait, focusing on a woman condemned to a mute and desperate submission: "My sister and I were in school, my father was at work [...]. My mother was trapped in her silence." The possessive and isolating regime imposed by the father cracks only with the ringing of a poorly tolerated telephone, with sporadic classmates, with a friend of the mother who is soon expelled... In this concentration camp-like microcosm, an irrepressible desire to be reborn gradually takes hold in the son, and in the readers: to be oneself, to live one's own life, to open up to others without fear of reprisal. The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation, which dismantles and unmasks the family's totalitarianism. It wounds us with its honesty, disarms us with its delicacy, and becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something we may not have known directly, yet which affects us nonetheless.