The disillusionment of the last century

Jean-Michel Guenassia had become known with the "Club of Incorrigible" awarded the Goncourt Award for students in 2009. As he explained in an interview on YouTube, it has long sought to give a sequel to this novel renouncing it finally given the difficulty in reviving its characters in a new context. That's when the idea came to him to design a new character that will become the focus of her new novel "The Dreamlife of Ernesto G.".

This will, Joseph Kaplan, who will cross the century. Born in 1910 in Prague, he his hundredth birthday, a century later, the last witness of a life that has seen the worst abominations of human history, the twentieth century was not stingy unprecedented horrors. As Josef K. in Kafka's Castle which is made explicit blink of aeil, it has been the plaything of history, caught in the torment of wars and revolutions that have swept one hundred years of an unusual existence .

Joseph Kaplan is a man deeply engaging because viscerally faithful in friendship as in love, devoted and capable of indulging body and soul to projects that change the world without trying to profit from this excellent staff. This is what makes the strength but also the limit when around him betrayals, reversals, paranoia all forms begin to hit as blindness fiercely.

This lover of Gardel he has all the disks could have an easy life. Handsome, exceptional dancer, he collected during his female conquests started studying medicine in Prague and continued in Paris. Spotted for his intelligence and his work, he will be hired by the Pasteur Institute and sent to Algiers to work on the development of specific vaccines to combat viruses decimating livestock and men.

With the second war and the raids Jews besetting Algeria, he will have to flee into the corn, survive three years before deciding, war barely over, returning to Czechoslovakia with his wife life, Christine, which are structured around two-thirds of the novel. He will find a country ravaged by war and carried away by the communist utopia. He spent the rest of his days there and experience the glory as the most extreme punishment.

When he could flee when the borders were opened for three months, during the Prague Spring, he will remain behind to protect his daughter Helena, anchor of the last third of the novel. Became head of a sanatorium lost away from everything, he will receive, by order of the terrible secret police, a Uruguayan ill, Ernesto G., ravaged by tuberculosis, malaria and dysentery. A man with a glorious past that we will discover with him, historical character we discover here a page of his life ignored even if it is the subject of a fictionalized version here. It is with this episode that his life will switch definitively. Wings Over the last illusions, there will not be a communist regime cold, manipulative, deeply destructive to the lives which do not matter except to advance a cause mad, dogmatic and aimless. A diet that will eventually crumble itself not without destroying around Joseph many destinies, many stories, many beings.

The author, through this long romantic fresco, reminds us that the last century was a long century full of disillusionment which many became martyrs and little reluctant heroes. It is not certain that the twenty-first century to do better ...

A beautiful book that reads with interest but without spark of passion.

Find my reading notes on thierrycollet-cetalir.blogspot.com
Published by Editions Albin Michel - 2012 - 535 pages