Pas pleurer

Two interwoven voices. That of Georges Bernanos, outraged witness to the Spanish Civil War, who denounces the terror inflicted by the nationalists with the blessing of the Catholic Church. And that of Montse, the narrator’s mother, who seventy years on has erased everything from memory except the radiant days of the libertarian uprising of 1936, which she lived as a girl in her Catalan village in candor and joy. Two visions that resonate strangely with our present, carried by Lydie Salvayre’s prose, by turns impeccable and joyfully unruly. Winner of the 2014 Prix Goncourt.