To those who think with Denis de Rougemont that "happy love has no history", Nina Bouraoui gives the lie with his 11th novel, "Call me by my first name", the story First Person of the beginnings of love between a woman writer and a young man.
In a bookstore in Switzerland, a writer encounters one of his readers, a young man 16 years her junior who gave him a letter in which he explains how his novels have helped to live. It also provides a video inspired by his work. Thus began a long correspondence by mail between the narrator and his Parisian Swiss player.
After several novels describing violent passions, "Call me by my first name" shows the slow emergence of love through words, with his doubts, questioning, until the final demonstrated, that of two desires that recognize and agree. Nina Bouraoui excels at painting the steps of the feeling of love, to analyze with great finesse when everything changes, where a wave attraction is transformed into a passion. The finest passages in the novel are those before the meeting of bodies, those which love is born of words, which feeds the fantasy of absence.
Although some passages in staccato sentences and structure identities are a bit tiresome and if certain images lend themselves to smile ("I appear to the existence lava hot and golden, flowing under our skins"), the author often able to crystallize into a beautiful formula and just the beginnings of love dazzle. A beautiful novel about love in the time of speech technologies.
In a bookstore in Switzerland, a writer encounters one of his readers, a young man 16 years her junior who gave him a letter in which he explains how his novels have helped to live. It also provides a video inspired by his work. Thus began a long correspondence by mail between the narrator and his Parisian Swiss player.
After several novels describing violent passions, "Call me by my first name" shows the slow emergence of love through words, with his doubts, questioning, until the final demonstrated, that of two desires that recognize and agree. Nina Bouraoui excels at painting the steps of the feeling of love, to analyze with great finesse when everything changes, where a wave attraction is transformed into a passion. The finest passages in the novel are those before the meeting of bodies, those which love is born of words, which feeds the fantasy of absence.
Although some passages in staccato sentences and structure identities are a bit tiresome and if certain images lend themselves to smile ("I appear to the existence lava hot and golden, flowing under our skins"), the author often able to crystallize into a beautiful formula and just the beginnings of love dazzle. A beautiful novel about love in the time of speech technologies.
"Call me by my first name" Nina Bouraoui, Stock, 2008, 112 p., 14,50 €.
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