Having already been awarded the Fnac 2018 prize, selected for the very prestigious Goncourt and Renaudot prizes, adored by the media, the first novel of Belgian Adeline Dieudonné, La vraie vie is already making the buzz of the new literary season. In a horrendous tale, narrated by a young girl with a brutal father, violence mingles with absurd and dark humour. Decoding of a phenomenon:
A badass heroine
A few months after the publication of the best seller My absolute darling by Gabriel Tallent who explored the violence of a father on a young girl, as mature as she was clever. In her first novel the 36-year-old Belgian sets forth an adolescent as free as she is intelligent. When her kid brother Gilles, goes nuts after having been the witness of an atrocious drama, the heroine (whose name we don’t know), fascinated by Marie Curie, decides to make a time machine. Spectator and victim of her father’s violence, a father obsessed by hunting, stuffed animals and whisky, this badass kid overflows with imagination to live her life as she wants to.
A fistful novel
Not a work, a comma nor an extra period in this novel with a very strong penmanship. The story, to be read in one feel swoop, leaves no room for boredom and alternates between scary darkness that titillates our voyeur side and yellow humour (even black) that allows us to catch our breath from time to time.
Verdict
Throw yourself on this literary UFO! With feminist bursts incarnated by a young girl, who is much more clever than all the men around her, Adeline Dieudonné signs a fiction to be read by everyone.
La vraie vie, by Adeline Dieudonné, The iconoclast, €17
Also discover : The amazing biographie signed Michèle Fitoussi
