"Specimen", "I walk in groups"… Literary favorites for June 1st

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We start with Specimen, Pauline Claviere. It’s published by Grasset and it’s a slap in the face. The writer is young, but she has already produced three works. This is his fourth. And it really is a book, as the exergue indicates, that you will remember for a very, very long time. That’s a sentence from Maxime Chattam, which has the habit of making his readers’ blood run cold. “At the origin of my book, there is a mother’s anxiety, a seemingly innocuous gesture that I do every morning: dropping my son off at his nanny’s house. And one day, an idea arrived by force. What if this gesture that I do every morning put him in danger? If I didn’t do what was necessary? In parallel with “I had heard of a story about a young man who was worried about acts of exposing a minor and these two situations collided in my mind to form an obsession. So I would say that at the origin of this book, there is an obsession,” explains Pauline Claviere.

So from this obsession, Pauline Clavier will construct a novel which features a television journalist like her, a novelist like her, a young mother like her, a resident of Marseille like her, and worried about knowing if her nanny’s son might not be a pedophile like her. We then find ourselves trapped in a kind of distorting game of mirrors and we find ourselves hoping, even praying, that fiction here will prevail over reality. This is the story of Elena, who is delighted to have found an exceptional nanny for her little boy Lucas. Until the day she discovers that her nanny has a 19-year-old son, who is on the run because he is accused of belonging to a pedophile network. Before his escape, he left behind him a rather frightening illustrated logbook.

This logbook begins with this sentence: “I have always found that children are more beautiful humans than others”. The nanny will entrust this logbook to Elena, with the responsibility of sorting out fact from fiction and trying to exonerate her son since, obviously, no mother can imagine that her son is a pedophile. Knowing that at the same time, Elena remembers her best friend Laura who disappeared overnight when she was in sixth grade. It made a novel with an extremely taboo subject: sexual violence committed by adolescents against children. It’s a sort of Pandora’s box that opens. For the purposes of her novel, Pauline Clavier interviewed a real psychiatrist in Sainte-Anne. Her testimony is absolutely frightening, but be careful, despite this theme which can be a little off-putting, but which is highly topical – we have seen it clearly with the problems in nursery schools and daycare centers – Pauline Claviere’s writing is absolutely incredible. It’s rhythmic, its chapters are ultra-short, it’s frankly super strong.

We continue with a much lighter first novel. “I walk in groups” by Rudy-Williams Kabuiku. It was published by Fleuve Éditions. Here, our hero is called Curtis. He is 19 years old, he is of Congolese origin and he is serving a prison sentence at the Loos-les-Lille penitentiary center, renamed Los Angeles. As an opening, Curtis shows us his cell between his PlayStation, his math book and his limescale toilet. He’s having a little trouble killing time locked up 22 hours a day. So the situation could have lasted a long time if his lawyer hadn’t had a brilliant idea: negotiating a reduced sentence in exchange for obtaining his baccalaureate. Except that the bluff is absolutely enormous since he was released in July, the remedial session is in September, and he obviously hasn’t revised anything. So he goes straight into the wall, but he still remains determined and he announces: “I had two months to rob my fucking baccalaureate.”

So how does he do it? It’s not obvious. The return home starts off rather badly. The new door – because the old one was smashed by the battering ram of the police officers who banged on the door to stop it – does not work with its own keys and the reception from his mother is absolutely polar. Fortunately, the warmth of his good old friends brightens his daily life and after a slight moment of hesitation, he will recruit the cream of the crop: Makeda, his best friend and brains of the operation; Adem don Juan; Mr. Diti the genius hacker and Ange, each with a function, either working on a subject, or working on a role – I won’t tell you which – to help him get his baccalaureate. Kabuiku has a direct, biting, very funny and unvarnished style. His sentences slam like uppercuts. “In court as in music, a black note is worth half as much as a white one.” Humor permeates every page, even in the darkest moments, there is no pathos, there is no complacency. Very strong themes are addressed: racism, discrimination, stereotypes and tolerance. It smacks of something experienced, even something seen and heard. Frankly, it’s worth reading in the sun this summer to laugh and to rediscover the virtues of friendship.

We end with a children’s book: “It appears that” by Olivier Tallec, published by Pastel. So there, it’s a total disaster. How to say? The squirrel accidentally swallowed an apple seed. And it seems that when you swallow an apple seed, you could turn into a tree. Which would mean that the apple trees in the orchard garden might be people who have swallowed apple seeds. To find out for sure, the squirrel goes to consult his friends and everyone agrees. Gunther the mouse says that a red seed makes you a red tree and the hedgehog swears that a pear seed turns you into a pear tree.

So, the poor squirrel, well, he doesn’t even dare to drink the raindrops anymore for fear of watering his inner tree and he constantly stares at his feet for fear that they will turn into roots. You will have understood, Julien, this hilarious and very clever book was designed to develop the critical thinking of our children and dismantle the mechanisms of rumor. Olivier Tallec’s drawings are, as always, hyperbeautiful and extremely poetic. He is a very prolific author. I read a lot to my children. This one is the last one. They’re a little big, but at least I had fun. Honestly, go for it. It is to be read to your little ones from 3-4 years old.