painful and light: a novel to grow

Enzo Popov is a boy of twelve, who lives alone with his mother, Lyuba, "still in his twenties" (she is 29 years old and thus had very young), in a rich Parisian apartment where they occupy a small room exchange daily cleaning which kills his mother. The owners are never there or just passing through. This allows Enzo to attend a good college 1st arrondissement of Paris. But now, it is not like them, he is poor, large, badly dressed up, and he does not know his father. He quickly became the scapegoat of his classmates, who will make him suffer the worst violence and humiliation. Enzo was his mother, literature to escape, and dreams in which he escapes more.

What a beautiful novel that this "night in truth", a painful and gloomy novel, certainly, but that carries with it something bright. Dreamlike, almost fantastic, he said the mother-son relationship, the search for origins, the father, the need to live his youth for the mother while being a good mother despite the limited resources, grime violence and stupidity of youth when they are in groups, the pretenses, misinterpretation, but also hope. What does not kill you makes you stronger they say. Véronique Olmi sensitively describes the deficiencies of these two characters, a deaf violence is reminiscent of his first "Seaside", the need to move forward, always: an intimate romance and initiation on a painful transition to adulthood.