As much as it disguises itself as a routine history, we already know that the David Foenkinos It is not going into manners or inter-family relationships in search of secrets or dark sides. Because the already world-renowned French author is more of a surgeon of letters in form and substance. Everything is dissected on the operating table, ready to analyze the focus of the tumor or humor as a fluid from which joy flows.
And is that since I write, Foenkinos is kundera with latex gloves, ready to narrate with the most precise asepsis what life shows to each new layer of skin or organic level or viscera if it touches. And it turns out that it convinces us that yes, that is life, a cyclical molecular repetition in which each character that lives in that life, made a book or ours, is a bit of ourselves.
Empathy is not magic, it is "only" about having the gift of writing transcending one's own history. And the point is that the protagonist of this book may be Foenkinos whispering into the other author's ear each new scene that occurs between improvisation and that script point that we all seem to intuit in the basting of our days.
Synopsis
A writer immersed in a creative block decides to carry out a desperate action: the subject of his next novel will be the life of the first person he meets on the street. This is how Madeleine Tricot enters his life, a charming old woman willing to tell him about her secrets and wounds: of marriage and widowhood, of her work as a seamstress for Chanel during Karl Lagerfeld's golden age, of the disparate relationship with her two daughters.
Valérie, the oldest of them and who lives in the same neighborhood, doubts the intentions of this writer, but decides that it could be good therapy for her mother. And not only that: in order for her to continue with her task, she demands that the writer include her in the story she is sketching, as well as all the members of her family, the Martin family, traversed by both love and love. exhaustion from routine. Little by little the threads of all these stories are entangled in a skein of memories, longings, resentments, emotions that seemed lost and others that, hopefully, can be recovered.
You can now buy the novel "The Martin Family" by David Foenkinos, here:
