Emma Marsantes closes a family trilogy with a novel of inherited grief
In « N'efface pas mes cercles », the writer returns to her mother's suicide and completes a trilogy that traces the wounded branches of her family tree, according to Le Temps.
The novel opens on a beach on France's Atlantic coast, where a young boy drowns in a rough wave before his family's eyes, depriving his father — a wealthy industrialist — of his cherished heir. Le Temps describes the scene, just two pages long, as spare and unforgiving, the inaugural drama whose shock will travel through several generations.
Seventy years later, in a bourgeois Paris suburb, a woman hangs herself in her kitchen closet. Her daughter narrates N'efface pas mes cercles, which Le Temps calls the epicenter of layered misfortunes that Emma Marsantes dissects in spare, economical sentences — likened in the piece to incisions drawn straight from the skin of violence.
Le fils unique est mort. Elles le savent, il aurait mieux valu que ce soit l'une d'entre elles. N'importe laquelle aurait bien fait l'affaire. Toutes en paieront le prix, chacune à sa manière.
Emma Marsantes, N'efface pas mes cercles
According to Le Temps, the book closes a trilogy in which Marsantes has worked through the wounded branches of her family tree, writing, as the paper's headline puts it, against inheritance itself.
Sources
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