Jane Sautière gives exiles faces and first names
In a new book for this year's rentrée littéraire, the French writer turns migrants who are usually seen only in passing into people with stories, according to En attendant Nadeau.
Jane Sautière's De la terre des pleurs un grand vent s'éleva is part of this autumn's rentrée littéraire, and it takes as its subject a category of people French readers are used to walking past without really seeing: exiles. According to En attendant Nadeau, the book works by accumulation of small, concrete detail — a face, a first name, a fragment of a life story — rather than by argument or statistic.
The review, titled « Notre origine humaine », frames this method as a way of restoring a shared condition: the people Sautière writes about stop being an abstract mass at the edge of the news and become, one by one, recognisably human. En attendant Nadeau reads the book as a reminder that the distance between those who flee and those who merely read about it is smaller than it appears.
No further detail on the book's length, publisher or structure is given in the source material, and none is supplied here.
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