“Angers of the Living,” by Sophie Daull: letters to the absent
By Anne Crignon
Published on , updated on
Sophie Daull. WILLIAM BEAUCARDET/ PHILIPPE REY
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Review The author depicts the generational divides and the many challenges facing the agricultural world today ★★★☆☆
Ten years ago, Sophie Daull walked into a bookstore like someone going to the emergency room with a book for her daughter, Camille, who was taken by illness in her seventeenth year. Four novels later, the audience that had supported her is there, and in ever-increasing numbers, as she returns with "Colères du vivant" (the title isn't very apt: it sounds like the umpteenth essay on the ongoing ecocide). The story is interesting. A Parisian intellectual who has gone to live in Mogelles, a small, invented village, sets out to reconcile her farmer neighbor with his angry daughter—no news for ten years. Convincing her to come back for her father's 50th birthday becomes an obsession.
A farmer . There are few novels set in farmland. Beyond his reputation as a thick brute, the gloomy tractor-rider, whom Sophie Daull makes her central character, is a shrewd mind overcome by a misanthropy proportional to the devastation wrought by agribusiness. A world emerges, populated by men ruined by imbecilic European standards.
An absentee. The Parisian woman understood how much her neighbor was suffering from no longer seeing...
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