Mouth to ear – autumn 2021
When our librarians are challenged, moved, amused, transported or transformed by a document, they like to share it with you. They do this through “Word of Mouth”, bookmarks placed in the documents available on our different sites.
We’ve selected a few below to whet your appetite.
Books
Penelope’s journey
Marie Robert
Marie Robert is the teacher who makes philosophy sexy. Passionate, she invites the “great” authors into our daily lives. Penelope, the heroine of her novel, is leaving. She runs away from her life, clinging to her namesake as she sets sail for Ithaca.
In Greece, she encountered philosophy through discussions in which she struggled to feel really at ease. This did not stop her from embarking on a journey across Europe, where she met people who shared with her their passion for the history of ideas. These ideas will gradually permeate Penelope’s life, giving her new perspectives until she finds her place and gets involved in a concrete project that will thrill her.
Carole, Unithèque website
So we wage war against them
Joseph Andras
In 2016, Joseph Andras published De nos frères blessés, dedicated to Fernand Iveton, a pied-noir worker and independence fighter who was guillotined on February 11, 1957. Winner of the Goncourt prize for first novel, he wrote to the Académie to refuse the prize and the cheque, justifying his decision by declaring that “competition, rivalry and rivalry are, in my eyes, notions alien to writing and creation”. Moreover, he shied away from media attention, refusing to appear publicly.
With this new opus – others have been written in the meantime – he continues his impeccably documented indictment of the workings of oppression, broadening the scope to include animal domination, and, in three stories and temporalities, questions the ambiguity of our relationship with the living, without pathos. Writing as combat.
Patricia, Riponne site
Borrow paper books / borrow digital books
Little Country
Gaël Faye
Gaël Faye may be a singer, but he is first and foremost a poet, a lover of words. Inspired by his own life, his novel takes us to Burundi, to a childhood that we would like to be able to protect from the political events that broke out there in 1993. With a Rwandan mother and a French father, Gabriel, the protagonist, will try to remain a child for as long as possible, as calls for hatred fly around him.
The scenes of life are meticulously described, and you feel like you’re there… then suddenly everything seems to go wrong, and the ferocity of men intrudes on the reality of a young boy, who has to make his own choices, if that’s possible at all.
Years later, the choice is to return home, for the hero, but also for Gaël Faye, who writes, in the song with the same title as the book:“Je suis semence d’exil d’un résidu d’étoile filante” (“I am the seed of exile from a residue of a shooting star“).
Carole, Unithèque website
Borrow digital book / Paper book / Large print / Recorded literature / Film
