Open a collection of short stories gives me a thrill often delicious. The pleasure of discovery multiplies: the narrative threads are added together, complement each other, meet, building a delicate structure whose equilibrium is fragile. Where a hint of anguish for the reader ... Sometimes, indeed, the juxtaposition of short stories to produce a sort of fog. The confusion then blurs the contours, lines mask envelops the characters in an almost immediate deletion. And what could have been assessed as a beautiful bouquet combining scents to colors dissolves into an improbable amalgam and informs doomed to oblivion. But these books (word whose etymology is surprisingly related to both the words "pick" and "collect" the idea of combining the collection of protection) may give rise to complex architecture and beautiful, a work, or even a masterpiece, a gem showing all the brilliance of the talent of its author. Former kind, from Boccaccio or 'Heptameron it occupies in literature a key, is declining by all types and all registers.
And ensuing deaths was published in Threshold in February 2009. The literary season with trepidation is thus far ... but this book is for me a discovery. Eleven new are met, eleven texts engraved perfume anathema. Indeed, the title sounds like a threat, a curse uttered against the persons who succeeded each other through these pages accurate, funny, dramatic, sarcastic, scathing and elegance. Eleven unfortunate fates, eleven-profile disasters or covert, discrete, daily, or so astounding and appalling. Marc Villemain, a steady hand, it draws more than silhouettes: the characters are entered with one stroke, but in essence. Each of them gives a title to a new Nicole Lambert, Anemone d'Eyssinet Pietra, Anna Bouvier, MD ..., forming part of the universe very varied but consistent. Moreover, a character is a kind of red thread in the collection; Geraldine Bouvier, successively adjacent, good nurse, nurse, cyclist ... These multiple avatars create a unit of the collection, but also anchor it in a discrete form of humor, creating an expectation in the reader - Waiting secondary, the character is almost always relegated to the background - but important nonetheless, and establishing a complicity friendship between author and reader.
However, this link between different pieces of the collection is sufficiently thin and discreet so that each of the new is a world unto itself. One of the great successes of Mark Villemain lies in its ability to create harmony in diversity. The stories spring from different settings: a beach, waxing salon, bedroom, attic ... The protagonists, too, offer very different faces: young women almost commonplace, an heiress, a family man with no history revolutionary non-violent children, adults, old people, cannibals. Each of these characters is, in one way or another, faced with death. However, a text to another, climates, situations, plots vary on the subject of serious looks different and nuanced: ironic, dark, cruel, tender ... the turning of each page, a surprise. Thus, to laughter born of history and Nicole Lambert Odette Blanchard, who opens the book (and whose moral is: beware of depilatories) succeeds and wry black humor and raw emotion ( that I felt in reading the story called "Matthieu Vilmin" a shocking and lasting sense born of an encounter between fiction and reality). Marc Villemain recognizes that sometimes the effects on the reader escape him, but it is also the magic of literature (from the beautiful and good literature, would I write) that encourage the reader to appropriate the work, involving a certain way in the process of creation.
New Marc Villemain and embrace a variety of situations, but they also draw a kind of landscape of today's society , proposing reflection angles unexpected but effective. "Matthew Vilmin" encourages the reader to consider the relationship established between patient and caregiver a subtle and original - who is he who learns to live with each other? Is the relationship one way? The proposed answers to these crucial questions are not simplistic, on the contrary: they are divided to infinity, depending on the angle chosen, the state of mind of the reader - and that of the character, certainly. And this text serious laughter, paradoxically, is born in its most dramatic laughter mixed with tears, when the will to live is dwindling and disappears when the other has found the world the living. In all these texts, people move away, often from each other, the right path even more frequently, but strangely, this death might seem extraordinary every time is becoming commonplace, since it is the common lot to everyone. Whatever the path, since in the end, the outcome will be the same? Evoking the death of a character (or his physical deterioration: all the characters do not die in this book, but all lose something) is a way to dramatize the life or, conversely, to wear on her a glance bittersweet, charged with an affectionate irony. All these characters arouse pity at one time or another, even the most appalling of them (I think this incestuous father accused in court of children who reminded me irresistibly of the robbers in court M le Maudit ...).
This particular feature of this writing precise and elegant tension arises. The expectation created becomes a dynamic element, forcing the reader to continue its path in the work, then, by definition, a collection of short stories can be read piecemeal, in a independence facilitated by the short form. My reading - I speak from mine, since after all, reading is an individual and intimate - not that I adopt in general face a compendium. Often I open two books, juxtaposing the experiences at the risk of confusion. And subsequent deaths is a special collection that reads like a novel. Reading a text leads to another, and the ensuing deaths and are followed in a procession uninterrupted funeral and comical. Ultimately remains a strong impression, a memory Perennial, characters permanently inscribed in the memory of the reader. It is a tour de force that proves the qualities of writing Villemain Marc, an author modest and discreet, but the pen has a valuable real power. Great art ...
The latest news, Md., holds the reader in my heart a special place because it is a sort of break with the preceding text A young woman, is a writer (perhaps double it) is referred to the future, in an inevitable progression toward the destiny common to all the characters in the book. But here, nothing seems to prepare his death, except, perhaps, the anguish of the writer who ignores the effects of his creation on the drive. The words escape him, the characters seem to independence, mastery of this world becomes impossible.
"So, MD will be his desk. She reread the verbatim stories that fell into his fingers, wondering herself of their rhythm, their sound, their caprice, if not the characters themselves. Because they are so real these characters, so close. She asked if the reader will recognize the reality of these ghostly characters in his brain. Because MD has never needed critics to assess the limits of his art. She says that while it is not so bad at the bottom, it is well worth some of these successes that they exhibit in the shop, but she knows that everything is always destine to wind, wind heaths and night. "
In the beautiful dark eyes M. D., the awareness that this procession of ghosts on the moors of paper is perhaps more real than his own life of solitude at this table, in this empty bed where she does not elongate, sitting cross-legged smoking, mixing something in his body the wind, and the moor that night ...
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Marc Villemain And deaths ensue, Threshold, "New", 2009
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