Those who bought "The small second hand" love the new novel by Michèle Lesbre "The Red Sofa" distills the same little music, a literary prose sonatine of rare elegance, melancholy footprint illuminated landscape descriptions an adamantine beauty. It is perhaps significant that the narrator is named Anne again, as if the author had wanted to build a bridge from one book to another, emphasize continuity. And in fact, we find the same themes with pleasure a woman feels the need to break away from his daily trip on a train across Russia to regain a youthful love, and through the landscapes and the rooms where she only passes, immersed in a transit time for contemplation and meditation, let slip in her memories of loved ones, readings, talks about his meeting with Clemence, an elderly neighbor with which it discovers deep affinities, and gives him the courage to better face the transition to old age. And perhaps also the courage to face défintivement broken dreams by history, and broken dreams of his personal history is closely intertwined, to find a peaceful conscience: "We were looking for the impossible balance with stubbornness and ran to our loss. But I loved and I still love the certainty that no great ideas without love, freedom, and our desperate efforts to prove it had not been vains.C'était even all that inspired us. Basically I never gave up, and that tormented me was the impression that I did not know being in this perpetual quest, it might be that old, do longer seek the impossible balance. " After his trip, Anne finds these to Claude Roy, in perfect harmony with his being: "I was absent from my cloud rather indecisive, not a very safe going to be someone." Or, by focusing on a traveler, she grabbed secret analogies between his personal fate and the fate of the Russian people, "he only replied that he lived a long time away from all the false hope that the past the longer interested and that he expected nothing of tomorrow. I recognized in these words all it seemed to me guess in some looks and I understood. " We sometimes think of the books of Patrick Modiano, through this way of evoking memories, bit by bit, to touch them without dwelling, like a hand would not arise even on open wounds. By this tightly woven into a fabric of history and stories of individuals, inextricably intertwined. By this subtle and discreet art of link the scattered fragments of narration, to create games of echoes and correspondences between the beings and all the memory can collect: song lyrics, literary quotations, poetry fragments. For a taste of wandering, vagrancy. And is believed to touch the mysteries of singular writing, which does not seek to heighten the embers of pathogenic memories. As a protection, a setback. An art of touch, renunciation almost, acceptance of the passage of the ephemeral. An art of travel.
