Reading in 3 voices (1 writer + 2 actors)

Thu 25 June at 8pm / Duration: 45 min / Free of charge

A man and a woman meet on the beach in front of a burning house. Both must turn a page in their life. Michèle Lesbre, through them, invites us to turn once again the pages of Modiano’s novels, creating a strangely sweet universe.

Seeing flames behind a dune during one of her walks, the female narrator stops in her tracks. On the edge of the fire, hunched up under a blanket, a man contemplates the blaze. Intrigued, the woman accepts to stay with him. At odds with convention, she has just quit her job as a night watchwoman in a Paris hotel. She has also broken up with the man she loved. The characters in books by Modiano, which she re-read in their entirety during her nightly work shifts, were undoubtedly better company … Floating between real and fictional characters, she follows what she calls her "gentle slope". The man on the beach cannot stop talking. He came here to bury his mother and, apparently, to see this ominous house - where so many tragedies unfolded - disappear. This is where he remembers seeing a young woman drowned one Sunday in his childhood, his mother joining her lover, a former member of the OAS, and Sandra, with whom he wanted to live with here, but who was suddenly extradited to Italy and imprisoned. As she listens to this man she just met, the woman is in spite of herself overcome by the ghosts of her own past. Her lost ones, her love lost in Bologna, her quest and her fights all resurface, painting with gentle sweeping strokes the portrait of a woman whose freedom and solitude are her true companions. With her 11th book, Michèle Lesbre continues on her bright and determined way, where the magic power of words reawakens the hum of the world.

Background

Michèle Lesbre lives in Paris. Following years of local theatre and teaching in schools, she started writing haunting books about 15 years ago. Sur le sable, her eleventh, was published in May 2009, after Le Canapé rouge (which was shortlisted for the latest Goncourt Award and was awarded the Pierre-Mac-Orlan and Millepages Awards in 2007), La Petite trotteuse (Initiales bookstores Award Autumn 2005, Printemps du Roman Award 2006, Saint-Louis city award 2006), Un certain Felloni (2004) and Boléro (2003), all of them published by Sabine Wespieser Editeur. Michèle Lesbre has also written Nina par hasard (Seuil 2001), Victor Dojlida, une vie dans l’ombre (Noésis 2001), Que la nuit demeure (Actes Sud Babel noir 1999), Une simple chute (Actes Sud Babel noir 1997), Un homme assis (Manya 1993; Librio 2000) and La Belle Inutile (Le Rocher 1991).

Extract

“I thought he and I were like two survivors of a disaster, two castaways who both tried to shake off a nightmare. Everything was adrift around us, I was losing my footing, I couldn’t quite remember the sequence of events through which I had ended up on this beach, and I almost wondered if one way or another I wasn’t a little responsible myself.”