Noticing flames behind a dune where she had wandered, the narrator stops. At the edge of the fire, curled up under a blanket, a man lay prostrate contemplating the blaze. Intrigued, the woman agrees to stay with him.
She has just left her night shift at a Parisian hotel. She has also just had a break up with the man that she loved. The characters of Modiano's novels, which she re-read in their entirety during her nights at the hotel, undoubtedly offered better company... Floating between real and fictional characters, she follows what she refers to as her "slow decline."
The man on the beach never stops talking. He has come to bury his mother and to witness the disappearance of this unhappy house where so many dramas occurred: the young woman who drowned, his mother who would come meet her lover there, a former secret service agent, and Sandra, with whom he would have liked to live there but who had been brutally extradited to Italy and imprisoned.
Throughout the monologue of this chance companion, his listener is invaded by her own demons. Her losses, her love lost in Bologne, her quest and battles reemerge, painting with light touches the portrait of a woman for whom freedom and solitude are close companions.
With this eleventh book, Michèle Lesbre continues her path, determined and luminous, where the enchanting power of words awakens the world's murmurings.
