Troubled, fascinated, shaken, disturbed ... I do not really know how to define myself after arriving at the end of this strange and amazing story. I do not dare call it novel. I am looking for a definition. Should I call it "newspaper"? "Testimony"? Where does the novel and begins the story of a life? Try to understand me seems to be indiscreet. This feeling makes me say that I am more in the "newspaper" and not in the "novel". Probably my training and therapist work lead me to seek, to read between the lines, interpreting the suffering, the wounds of the soul of this Carla looks like many women I heard the experiences and that I have supported.
As an author, I can only express my admiration for the talent of Sylvie Grignon who handles the language with skill and power. His pen perhaps a romance touching, almost naive, and then soak in the most unforgiving vitriol. His painting of human society leaves a bitter taste that accentuates each chapter. Is there really no hope? Is the balance sheet at the end of a life, the relational loneliness between people? Sylvie is no gift. Rather I should say Carla, who says, is no gift. The relationship between men and women, in their love relationship, appears for an announced bankruptcy. Wickedness, betrayal, addiction, cowardice seem almost inevitable in all stages of life of Carla. As if all the beautiful and noble feelings she feels at times of its existence were not viable, as if all the hopes which caressed, his dreams, his projects were inevitably doomed to more or less short term. Poor Carla! The reader wants to comfort her, to protect her. What karma hanging over this poor Carla!
As in "red", another brilliant book Sylvie Grignon, sex is everywhere. Sylvie knows my opinion. It is perfectly described, but there are, to my taste, a little too will like without any doubt and Sylvie is very strong in the erotic language, but I hope anyway, that the lives of men and women do not only to reduce these episodes.
A final thought. Think Carla as a victim would be wrong. Carla is a strong girl, a woman who suffers and yet decided to rebel. She is the voice of many women raped, subject dominated. These women, products of a male dominated society, still seeking a balance between the role of Lolita, family mother, business woman often losing them their true identity and wasting their talent.
Being a woman is learned and that is what our society has forgotten to teach or perhaps does not want to be enseignerpeut Carla lack there an opening in its quest for happiness, finding him an ideal to detach from the trap material.
The epilogue suggests that the "remaining books" Carla are yet to discover. So I look after hoping, as she wrote in the last line, the middle "further suffering" also speak of "so many wonderful moments."
Amanda Castello
