The title, "A childhood dream", could be misleading: no silver spoon in the mouth of little Catherine Millet (pronounced mid-ugly as he said his father). She comes from a toddler-bourgeois milieu poor, like many others, in the France of the alleged war boom, not so glorious for most people. the father is a salesman of cars. The mother is a secretary. The apartment is cramped. the couple does not intend, after the father's return from captivity after the war. Little Catherine has no luck. brother dies in a car accident. The mother, whose reason falters, if défenestré. smoker cancer outweighs the father. Painful fate of a family, summarized in a final chapter sharp as the guillotine of time passing and wins all nearby. One might fear the boredom of yet another childhood story. It is not. Which pulls the story to literature, it is a kind of grace that transforms the landscapes and characters. Bois-Colombes Millet became the Combray of Marcel Proust ("They were of the hill, we were in the valley," she wrote, echoing his favorite writer). This could be as - rain and less - Loire-bottom Champs d'honneur. "Make this middle of nowhere a mythical place" is for Millet, like Jean Rouault, the magic wand of fairy literature. Because there is a magic in this reconstruction of both meticulous and legendary memories of childhood. The grandmother Jeanne, Dr. van der Stegen are, under his pen, figures that one forgets. Another feature of this narrative is the split of the author approach. Catherine Millet portrays himself in the first person. But we just immediately replace the I, for a sociological, educational, historical or analytical about the behavior of children his age. For example (p. 254): "I was lying ... Why conceal us ...". This oscillation of the subjective to the objective creates a trembling effect in acute analysis frustrations, emotions and resolutions of this little girl who is singular at the same time of his generation and of all time. The concern for the little Catherine is a writer. She discovers that she can proudly recognize Balzac once in an anonymous text read on the radio: "I became a member of the brotherhood of literature connoisseurs" ... "Until we have a pen, I had the ear "(p. 243). She analyzes her life split: "Imaginative like me walk on the surface of the world as a Möbius strip ... this reversal continuously the actual product a strange perception of time ... (p. 253). And the miracle happens, for this little girl who believes so strongly in God: it is the story of this learning that hard (. "It was a job waiting for me navvy" p 245) making it , a stroke of the pen, the writer she has always dreamed of being!
