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September 2020Une histoire belge
by Massart, Robert
Two residents of Brussels who should never have crossed paths meet in strange circumstances. A French teacher, activist for Frenchness, afflicted with a phobia of birds; The other Flemish living in the capital, a collector of graffiti in public toilets and convinced that Dutch is the language of paradise, the primordial language from which all the others derive. The difficult – but stubborn – relationship between the teacher and the amateur epigraphist will be shattered by the eruption of a young Romanian woman, a waitress in an upscale tearoom with gay customers. Madness Mainata, amorous bistro owner, rather natural concierge, invasion of rats, enormous cataclysms, nothing will be spared them in the capital of a Belgium undermined by its eternal community and linguistic skirmishes. A first novel, with scathing humor, by a lover of the French language.
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May 2020La lumière de l'archange
by Adam, Gérard
Written between 1986 and 1990, while the Internet was in its infancy, published in 1992, finalist for the Rossel Prize (the main Belgian literary prize), La Lumière de l'Archange was at the time a novel by slight anticipation, since it took place at the end of 1999. Pierre Lhermitte, French specialist in viral diseases, Nobel Prize in medicine for the vaccine against AIDS, founder of a brotherhood of scientists, is the victim of the virus he is studying, a formidable mutant that has arisen in the Central African forests. Held in quarantine in his own department, supported by his friends around the world, he participates in the speed race between the epidemic and research, while becoming aware of a contemporary world from which he had until then abstracted himself and that is shaken by deep social or geopolitical upheavals, as well as the explosion of ultraviolent fanaticisms and the advent of millenarian movements in this last year of the twentieth century. But strange psychic changes appear in the survivors. Is the development of life at a crossroads? Pierre Lhermitte, sent to Africa to coordinate the fight against the epidemic in the hope of keeping him landlocked, will be involved simultaneously in an exceptional adventure and in an inner, psychological, metaphysical and spiritual quest. A visionary novel, whose only flaw is that it was published too early. Now that the epidemics of mutant viruses (Ebola, Covid19) are succeeding and amplifying one another, it is extremely topical, and warns us of the dangers that the contemporary world – and our behavior – poses to a humanity rushing headlong towards the wall.
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April 2019Les contrées des âmes errantes
by Samic, Jasna
In their modest Paris apartment coveted by the promoters, Lena sees Alyosha get drunk every night and obsessively obsessively look at his family documents. This once brilliant computer scientist, one of the most elegant men in Sarajevo, is undermined by his eternal interrogation: did his father, whom he did not know, roll convoys of death before disappearing in 1945 ? Through three diaries of Alyocha's ascendants, that of his Babushka Liza - a Russian who knew Tolstoy and escaped Bolshevism to Bosnia -, that of his mother Irina and that of his Omama Grete – emigrated from Vienna to Sarajevo –, Lena tells the family saga of her first ex-husband, remained a lover then re-married to escape the war... Crossing wanderings mingled with her own – Sarajevo, Istanbul, London, New York and especially Paris – driven by her love for art and a fierce thirst for independence, in constant quest for authenticity, confronting against the winds and tides the ubiquitous apparatchiks, the devious males, the literary impostors, the Parisian snobs, the Islamist fundamentalists at last…
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December 2015Le givre et la cendre
by Samic, Jasna
Through three diaries written at different times (around the 1940-1945 war, before and after the 1992-1995 war) by three members of the same family, Jasna Samic, torn between a tough survival in Paris where she is constantly threatened with expulsion and stays in Sarajevo where his father lived his last moments, gives us a novel about the difficult relationship between a daughter and her father, but also about exile and the rapid disintegration of Bosnian society on the eve of the war that will tear the Balkans in the 90s. An Ödön von Horvath’s sentence acts of faith in this double exile novel : “I have no homeland and of course I do no suffer of that. The concept of homeland, falsified by nationalism, is foreign to me ... My country is the mind. " As in all the work of Jasna Samic, "Le givre et la cendre" is a double exile novel. Loving both French culture and the Balkan atmosphere, the author, when in Sarajevo, dreams of Paris and, when in Paris, dreams of Sarajevo. The painting of the economic, political and moral decomposition of Bosnian society that preceded and provoked the war and the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1995) must be a warning in these times when our old world without project sees the rise up everywhere of nationalist demons he seems to have forgotten the devastation.
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February 2020On ne coupe pas les ailes aux anges
by Donnay, Claude
An unprecedented heat wave. The bodies suffer, the spirits heat up, the landmarks waver like silhouettes in a haze of heat. The crowd invades the streets of Brussels to let out a rage without clearly defined object, if it is only "that" can not last any longer. Arno, a young gay man, is the victim of a violent assault which sends a shock wave to those around him, to his friend Bastian and even to the inspector in charge of the investigation. A question arises between the capital, the Ardennes and the Orient: are our world, our way of life, melting in the furnace? What if the dikes that we thought intangible disappeared? what if the barriers broke under an obtuse thrust? What if the darkest of our memories came back to burst the surface in pestilential bubbles?
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February 2020Baie Saint-Paul
by Saëz, Jean-Manuel
When John Mac Dolan, a long time ago, arrived in Shortfalls, a small town on the edge of the Yukon, no one asked him who he was or where he came from. He was one of the many adventurers who made the reputation of this region of Canada since the Gold Rush and for whom the inhabitants show no curiosity. It was not, however, the fortune he had come to seek. As for what he found there, perhaps Camille Dorchamp, a Parisian air hostess, will find out when she receives a strange letter from the Sheriff of Shortfalls that will lead her on an unforeseen adventure?
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May 2020Exquises petites morts
by Schraûwen, Liliane
Love... We seek it, we pursue it, we make it and undo it, we enjoy it, we suffer for it. We sing it, write it, paint it, play it and pretend it... We die for it, or we kill. But what does this word cover? We love God (sometimes), our homeland (rarely), our parents, our children. We love to laugh and sing, we love sports, movies, and even chocolate or good wine. We love our dreams, we love to love. We love, also and above all, this half of orange that we have been told over and over again that it exists, that it is there, somewhere, waiting for us, and that it will meet all our desires, all our needs. The same term to designate so many things: possession, enjoyment, domination, jealousy, voluptuousness, tenderness, sacrifice... Eros and agape have always played hide and seek to better deceive us. Sometimes they deceive themselves and everything goes wrong. The bus swerves, disappointment devours us, the sleeping beauty forgets to wake up, lightning strikes for good...
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May 2020Les hibiscus sont toujours en fleurs
by Bernier, Monique
Charlotte, a European girl, and Daniel, a Rwandan boy, grew up together for five years, until the 1994 genocide. Twenty years later, Charlotte returns to Rwanda. She intends to find Daniel and rediscover the land that chased her away. She rediscovers Rwandan acquaintances, meets new people and gradually discovers the dramatic history of her friend as well as the complexities of the country. Daniel, for his part, is still in pain. The past is desperately present. He doesn't know Charlotte is looking for him…
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February 2014Les tablettes d'Oxford
by Wauthier, Jean-Luc
« Twenty years ago, church historian Martin Marty and his accomplice Jerald C. Brauer, the late dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, wrote a monograph about fictitious theologian Franz Bibfeldt. Entitled The Unrelieved Paradox : Studies in the Theology of Franz Bibfeldt and based on real and fictitious sources, this magnificent hoax was at once comic relief and escapist cover-up ; it allowed its authors to probe issues vexing postmodern theologians, to reflect on the illusory nature of truth, and to safely promote their own beliefs. Les tablettes d’Oxford is built on similar premises. In the preface, Jean-Luc Wauthier recounts his discovery in the Oxford University Library in England of late antiquity tablets purportedly written by the last emperor of the western part of the Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus. He silences his own doubts by citing Marguerite Yourcenar’s discovery of the “authentic” memoirs of Roman emperor Hadrian, introducing us through this transparent lie to the novel’s picaresque realm. An old man when he wrote his memoirs, Romulus Augustulus borrows Yourcenar’s measured and melancholy classical accents, and yet the very fabric of this literary vanitas throws us back to the present. In an homage to the famed comic books Tintin and Asterix, Wauthier repeatedly refers to the incompetent fifth-century emperor Olybrius, whose name has become a familiar moniker for blustering characters, as in Captain Haddock’s favorite expletive, “olibrius!” ; repeatedly, he echoes the intrepid loyalty of Celtic hero Asterix, forebear of Europe. Even the box containingthe imperial documents (tablets and ostraca) is “sealed” by the virgin tome of a fictitious History of the Celts – an obvious tribute to nineteenth-century scholar Amédée Thierry’s Histoire des Gaulois. Thus, Les tablettes d’Oxford has a deep historical and literary resonance and a proud message. Teetering between historical truth and fiction, the action takes place during the final years of the western Roman Empire, between 475 and 542 c.e. It witnesses the imagined rivalry of Romulus Augustulus, deposed ruler of the West, and his cousin Justinian, rising emperor of the East who became heir to Rome. This momentous and murderous time is appropriately rendered in stylistic counterpoints between the vibrant and poetic tone of youth and the reflective, noble musings of old age on one hand and the almost colloquial, more direct language used to describe historical and political events on the other. Mildness alternates with brutality, happiness with tragedy, darkness with light, dreams with reality, poetry with ribaldry, present with past, Romulus’s formal journaling with his companion Amelia’s informal ostraca, nobility with the plebe, peace with war. This rapid pace of the narrative, these unexpected plot twists and tone changes, draw the reader in. More importantly, they serve as a setting for Wauthier’s own message – namely, Romulus’s plan of founding a new western Christian civilization with the help of the Celts and the Huns, these “noble Barbarians”.
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September 2018Le voisin de la Cité Villène
by Wilbaux, Elodie
This story is based on real facts. For the sake of confidentiality, the names of people, places and dates have been changed. Between 1985 and 1994, in Cité Villène, near Paris, children were abused by a pedophile. As adults, to free themselves from the silence that suffocates them, they complain. The narrator, a companion of one of them, reports hour after hour the details of the court trial. With a sobriety that releases all the better the emotion, she dismantles the mechanism that leads young victims to feel guilty and their families or relatives to be blind. A testimony all the more painful because it brings back buried suffering, herself having been, adolescent, victim of the actions of a narcissistic perverse teacher.
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February 2014Miteux et magnifiques
by Wilwerth, Évelyne
The banks of the canal, on the borders of Brussels. Pyramids of old trams, cars, scrap. the dump pits. All this ugliness, which sometimes turns into beauty… Like those characters, shabby or beautiful, beautiful and shabby. Because destinies tumble. Or take off. In no time. We cross and cross again Bilal, Marlene, Amsalu, Bérengère, Raphaël, Gina, the fisherman, the vagabond… Entangled fragments of life, which make the heart beat of this unlikely place and give these 24 dense, nervous, vertiginous short stories, a dimension of burst novel.
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September 2015Le train des enfants
by Caldor, Yves
“Exile is always carried deep within. Sometimes we think we read it in other people’s eyes. It is not always racism or hatred that we can detect there, but an indefinable glow, which seems to whisper to us softly: “No, you are not from here; you look nice like that, and we too want to appear nice, polite; we pretend nothing, but deep down, even if we accept you, you’re not from here.I don’t define myself as an immigrant; I’m here and all my there. An obsession: ‘double’ roots, mine, those of others; how to speak of ‘that’? How to write about ‘that’? So is it so difficult? Yes ... I am trying; define oneself, constantly redefine oneself; all my roots, my strata; what ploys to not lose any!”Born in Budapest in 1951, from a Hungarian father and a French mother, Yves CALDOR (Yves Káldor) lived his early childhood – bilingual – in Hungary and, from 1956, after the Soviet intervention against the insurgency in Budapest, in France. As a teenager, following the separation of his parents and the remarriage of his mother, he discovered Belgium (Hainaut, then Brussels where he lived for several years) before moving back to Wallonia; he readily asserts that he feels Belgian, Brussels and Walloon, while keeping his Magyar and French roots alive within him.
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September 2019L'Avenue, la Kasbah
by Soil, Daniel
The Avenue is the main street that crosses Tunis, from the sea to the medina. This is where, from time immemorial, people got angry. The Kasbah is the vast esplanade in the center of the Ministries, which has replaced a popular district considered too old by the authorities: it did not give a quite rewarding image of a country so new, so proud of its independence. It is between these two emblematic places that the upheaval of January 2011 took place, of which Daniel Soil was the witness. He was, before, during and after, amazed by the audacity of the rebels of this first "Arab Spring", mad with sympathy for these Tunisians mixed, young and old, urban and country. The novelist had no difficulty in creating a love in these circumstances, also revolutionary because he is fed by the social movement, his beauty, his inventiveness. Elie, a young Belgian filmmaker who came to Tunisia, meets Alyssa, a teacher. The cultural barriers that constrain their nascent love – which is expressed and developed on Facebook – are shattered by the 2011 Revolution, in which they both engage. Accompanied by the background of the opera "Dido and Aeneas", we follow in parallel the evolution of their love and that of the political situation: demonstrations, mobilization of young and old, free speech, until the fall of the dictator and the advent of a hope for democracy that sign the end of the one and the other. First novel about the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, starting point of the "Arab Spring", written by a foreigner who was the privileged witness of it.
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September 2017Sous le rideau, la petite valise brune
by Thiry, Françoise
During the winter of 1966, a Boeing 707 of Sabena arriving from Bujumbura landed on Belgian soil. A half-asleep girl, holding a small brown suitcase in her hand, trotted behind a flight attendant, who handed it over to a man wearing a white shirt with a funny white collar, a black suit, and on the back of the jacket a small golden cross. The hostess greets "Monseigneur" before splitting the crowd and disappearing. The heroine of the novel is a Métis child of a Burundian mother and an unknown Belgian father, taken from her maternal family to be, like many others, given in adoption to a "good Catholic family" in Belgium. Throughout the narration, the hidden part of the narrator questions her "licit" part in the hope that one day both will join. The reader follows the slow metamorphosis of the child and the amputation of his memory until his fierce struggle against oblivion, his efforts to "reattach" his broken halves lead to the discovery of his astonishing identity. To raise the curtain, to open the padlock of the little brown suitcase, is to traverse a singular journey imbricated in a collective history long shelved in the cupboard, a secret of state and a secret of Church: the forced rapt of the half-breeds, “the children of shame” born under Belgian colonization before the Independences. A moving and lucid autofiction, which shows to what extent a religious institution can place itself above the laws and make suffer in the name of a distorded pseudo-morals.
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September 2008Tlimiaslo
by Thomassettie, Monique
Short stories in the characteristic style of this unclassifiable author. Thanks to an ethereal narration, they combine dream and reality, poetry and reflection on art, psychology, philosophy, meditation and spirituality rooted in everyday life, independent of any form of dogma or religious institution.
