The 3 best books of Delphine de Vigan

If literature could be characterized as clearly as it is in painting, Delphine de Vigan she would be the writer of wounds as Sorolla is the painter of light and Goya is the writer of horrors in his later stage. Pain as the philosophical essence of existence finds in Delphine's narrative its necessary point of transcendence from the somatic to the spiritual, reconciling us all with our own wounds. Or at least offering therapy.

The point is that there is also beauty in this account of pain as a subjective experience and plot material. In the same way that sadness resides the sustenance and the lifeblood of poetry. You just have to know how to channel everything, recompose the drama to novel with intensity and end up projecting itself to other genres in an ingenious way.

That is the trick of a Delphine, already a leading writer on the French literary scene, with her ability to combine a literary cocktail with drops of Proust y The master, to name two great French storytellers in thematic antipodes. The result novels with an always surprising point on a tragicomic basis of life. Stories in which the author is exposed not only as an obvious narrator but also as a protagonist, acting in a magical transition between reality and fiction.

Top 3 recommended novels by Delphine de Vigan

Nothing opposes the night

In the end, Joël Dicker in his Room 622 he could have taken ideas from this novel 🙂 Because the transposition in the narrative itself, far beyond what an alter ego supposes, acquires a much greater value in this plot. The plot gains an unsuspected intensity in its commitment to explore the limits of reality and fiction, of the subjective as a common space with the reader.

After finding Lucile, her mother, dead under mysterious circumstances, Delphine de Vigan becomes a shrewd detective willing to rebuild the life of the missing woman. The hundreds of photographs taken over the years, the chronicle of George, Delphine's grandfather, recorded on cassette tapes, the family vacations filmed in Super 8, or the conversations held by the writer with her siblings, are the materials from which the memory of the Poiriers is nourished.

We find ourselves before a splendid, overwhelming family chronicle in the Paris of the fifties, sixties and seventies, but also before a reflection in the present time on the "truth" of writing. And very soon we, detective-readers too, discovered, that there are many versions of the same story, and that telling implies choosing one of those versions and a way of telling it, and that this choice is sometimes painful. In the course of the chronicler's journey to her family's past and to her own childhood, the darkest secrets will emerge.

Nothing opposes the night

Loyalties

It is curious how almost all of us, usually comfortable inhabitants of the childhood paradise, empathize greatly with other children who appear to us as survivors of their tragic childhood.

It must be precisely because of how paradoxical the idea of ​​innocence supposes with the rugged, with misfortune, with drama. The point is that this story of Theo embarks us once again in the permeable feeling of the greatest injustice, that a child cannot be a child.At the center of this novel is a twelve-year-old boy: Théo, the son of separated parents. . The father, mired in depression, barely leaves his chaotic and run-down apartment, and the mother lives consumed by an unbridled hatred for her ex, who abandoned her for another woman.

In the midst of this war, Théo will find an escape route in alcohol. Three other characters move around him: Hélène, the teacher who thinks she detects that the child is being abused from the hell he lived in his own childhood; Mathis, Théo's friend, with whom he starts drinking, and Cécile, Mathis's mother, whose quiet world reels after discovering something disturbing on her husband's computer… All these characters are wounded beings. Marked by intimate demons. For loneliness, lies, secrets and self-deception. Beings that are walking towards self-destruction, and those who can perhaps save (or perhaps definitively condemn) the loyalties that connect them, those invisible ties that bind us to others.

Loyalties

Based on real events

As a fan of writing I understand that having oneself as the protagonist must be, at the very least, compromised. Magically transported your self from the keyboard to that new world, you find yourself being an actor, facing a script ... I don't know, strange to say the least.

But for Delphine the matter seems to be tackled with the ease of one who pursues a youthful diary loaded with complementary inventions. That must be the trick. Finished off all this with the idea of ​​writing about the paradigm of the writer sitting in his chair and faced in an atrocious combat to the blank page. "For almost three years, I did not write a single line," says the protagonist and narrator.

Her name is Delphine, she has two children about to leave adolescence behind and is in a relationship with François, who runs a cultural program on television and is traveling through the United States filming a documentary. These biographical data, starting with the name, seem to coincide diffusely with those of the author, who with Nothing opposes the night, her previous book, swept France and half the world. If in that and in some other previous work he used fictional resources to tackle a real story, here you dress a fiction as a true story. Or not?

Delphine is a writer who has gone from the overwhelming success that put her under all the spotlight to the intimate vertigo of the blank page. And that's when L., a sophisticated and seductive woman, who works as a literary black writing memoirs of famous people, crosses her path. They share tastes and are intimate. L. insists to her new friend that she must abandon the fictional reality project at hand and revert to using her own life as literary material. And while Delphine receives threatening anonymous letters accusing her of having taken advantage of her family's stories to succeed as a writer, L., with his increasing meddling, is taking over her life until she borders on vampirization ...

Divided into three parts headed by quotes from Misery and The Dark Half of Stephen KingBased on true events, it is both a powerful psychological thriller and a shrewd reflection on the role of the writer in the XNUMXst century. A prodigious work that moves between reality and fiction, between what is lived and what is imagined; a dazzling set of mirrors that proposes a twist on a great literary theme –the double– and keeps the reader in suspense until the last page.

Based on real events

Other recommended books by Delphine de Vigan…

The gratitudes

Chance versus oblivion. Last characters that attest to the last time on stage of a human being. And on the sensations that this absence leaves, everything is projected towards an infinite number of assumptions. What was not known about the person who has already left, what we assume he could have been and the clear idea that we surely made mistakes in many of those considerations in the effort to reconstruct the character.

«Today an old woman whom I loved died. I often thought: "I owe her so much." Or: "Without her, I probably wouldn't be here anymore." She thought: "She's so important to me." Matter, duty. Is this how you measure gratitude? Actually, was I grateful enough? Did I show him my gratitude as he deserved? "Was I at her side when she needed me, did I keep her company, was I constant?", reflects Marie, one of the narrators of this book.

His voice alternates with that of Jérôme, who works in a nursing home and tells us: «I am a speech therapist. I work with words and silence. With what is not said. I work with shame, with secrets, with regrets. I work with absence, with memories that are no longer there and with those that resurface after a name, an image, a perfume. I work with the pain of yesterday and today. With confidences. And with the fear of dying. It's part of my job."

Both characters – Marie and Jérôme – are united by their relationship with Michka Seld, an elderly woman whose last months of life are told to us by these two crossed voices. Marie is her neighbor: when she was a child and her mother was away, Michka took care of her. Jérôme is the speech therapist who tries to help the old woman, who has just been admitted to a nursing home, recover, even partially, her speech, which she is losing due to aphasia.

And both characters will become involved in Michka's last wish: to find the couple who, during the years of the German occupation, saved her from dying in an extermination camp by taking her in and hiding her in their home. She never thanked them and now she would like to show them her gratitude…

Written in a restrained, almost austere style, this two-voice narrative tells us about memory, the past, aging, words, kindness and gratitude towards those who were important in our lives. It is their respective gratitudes that unite the three unforgettable characters whose stories are intertwined in this moving and dazzling novel.

the underground hours

Times lived as the underworld of existence. Hours buried by reality to expand like the base of the iceberg. In the end, what cannot be seen is what makes up existence to a greater extent.

A woman. A man. A city. Two people with problems whose destinies may cross. Mathilde and Thibault. Two silhouettes moving through Paris among millions of people. She lost her husband, she is left in charge of her three children and finds a reason to get up every day, her salvation, at her job in the marketing department of a food company.

He is a doctor and travels through the city between hellish traffic visiting patients, who sometimes just want someone to listen to them. She begins to suffer harassment at work by her boss. He is faced with the decision to break up with her partner. Both are in crisis and their lives are going to turn upside down. Are these two strangers destined to cross paths on the streets of the big city and meet? A novel about loneliness, difficult decisions, hopes and anonymous people who live in a huge city. 

the underground hours

the kings of the house

The family, a social cell, as some thinker said and they repeated Total Sinister in a hit of their repertoire. A cell that currently multiplies chaotically like good cancers that replicate in countless diseases. Nothing is what it was from the inside out. The home as a space for all kinds of influencers is already the auctioneer, what my grandmother would say...

Melanie Claux and Clara Roussel. Two women connected through a girl. Mélanie has participated in a television reality show and is a follower of its successive editions. When she becomes the mother of a boy and a girl, Sammy and Kimmy, she begins to record their daily life and uploads the videos to YouTube. They grow in views and followers, sponsors arrive, Mélanie creates her own channel and her money flows. What at the beginning simply consisted of recording from time to time the daily adventures of her children becomes professional, and behind the facade of this sweet and sweet family channel there are endless shoots with the children and absurd challenges to generate material. Everything is artifice, everything is for sale, everything is fake happiness, fictitious reality.

Until one day Kimmy, the young daughter, disappears. Someone has kidnapped her and starts sending strange requests. It is then that Mélanie's destiny intersects with that of Clara, a lonely policewoman with hardly any personal life and who lives by and for work. She will take over the case.

The novel begins in the present and extends into the near future. It starts with these two women and extends to the subsequent existence of these two exploited children. De Vigan has written a disturbing narrative that is at once a haunting thriller, a sci-fi tale about something very real, and a devastating document of contemporary alienation, the exploitation of intimacy, false happiness projected onto screens and the manipulation of emotions.

the kings of the house
5/5 - (14 votes)

5 comments on "The 3 best books by Delphine de Vigan"

  1. I loved this post, as I was interested in this author and now I'm going for the third of your recommendations. Nothing opposes the night seemed sublime to me. Thank you very much for reaching out to this author.

    Reply

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