Books: 5 novelties to devour under the sun

A unique prose

Whatever subject she tackles, Margaret Atwood does it in a living language, without heaviness or downtime. The 82 year old lady talk to us, in these Late poemsmourning, aging, passing time or personal or collective decay, she does it with a spirit, a playfulness, even, which leaves us dazzled as much as moved, like a cloudy sky pierced by a hundred rays of sun. . Lwriter originally from Ottawa, best known for his novels – starting with the famous The Scarlet Maid –, is no less a poet (she has published more than fifteen collections). A genre through which she is interested, as in all his work at the bottomunusual, singular. “Some berries grow in the sun / but they are smaller. / It’s like I’ve always told you: / the best grow in the shade. »

Late poems, by Margaret Atwood, translated from English by Christine Evain and Bruno Doucey, Robert Laffont, 192 pages.

On the ice floe

– By the way, mum, I don’t have a dad ?

Anything goes through her head because she’s still a child. His mother answers him :

– It’s true. Your dad died a long time ago, a very long time ago. We will only see him again at the end of the world.

The excerpt sets the tone for an extraordinary novel, which would probably never have reached us without Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, French by origin and Quebecer by adoption. This professor of anthropology met Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (1931-2007) in Nunavik during research he was conducting there in the early 1960s. He was quickly fascinated by this woman who, after learning Inuit syllabic writing, a system introduced by missionaries at the end of the 19^e century, had begun to write a novel recounting the daily life of her community before the arrival of the Bthrows. D’Anglure therefore worked, with the help of a few others, on a singular translation project, converting the text into Latin spelling and then translating it from Inuktitut. A noise seems here in a new version, its translator having thoroughly reworked the book first published in French in 2002. Of course, we have to get used to the little music of a story that obeys its own logic, where we slip quick from one subject to another – fishing, cooking, games – according to the intuitions of a writer who never went to school. More A noise represents an ino reading experienceyoureliable. dive into it gives us the impression of walking on the ice floe and sharing the life of the Inuit before colonization.