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Pas D Inquietude
Paperback
Series: La Bleue
ISBN13: 9782234065055
Publisher: Stock
Published: May 3 2021
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French
Not to Worry
Rights sold to Germany (Fischer)
TV rights under option
Instead of doing up the house he has just bought, the narrator of Not to Worry is forced to take a long time off work to stay with his sick son, and enters into a peculiar intimacy with him, made up of quite new acts and gestures, reinvented on a daily basis.
A house-husband in spite of himself, he loses touch with the printing press where he works and with his indispensible friend Manu, and slips into an invisible, domesticated life while his wife, who has recently been taken on by a small business, can't afford any time off and has no choice but to devote herself to her job.
This ordinary family gradually loses its social connections and points of reference, caught up in the logic of illness that suddenly gives their lives a different meaning, shatters each of their roles - not only the parents' but also Lisa's, the older sister - and sees other people's lives going on outside, suddenly unreal and inaccessible.
The day that his colleagues at the printing press each give the father some of their own holiday time so that he can continue devoting his days to Mehdi, this radical and unexpected surge of solidarity turns codes and customs upside down, and the question of the balance between the social sphere and the sphere of the family raises its head again, all the more emphatically.
In the end everything pivots on this allocation of time that was un-hoped for but which acts like a trap because such a gift like is so very complicated to give and to accept. In a world where solidarity is far from the norm, the generosity of these colleagues is reassuring and unsettling in equal measure, especially as they offer time not money.
The narrative tries to probe into what a life dedicated to another, to others, would be like, while also exploring the question of a gift, a debt, of submission and domination, and asking: what does it mean to be a father today, and what does it mean to be in a couple as parents?
Brigitte Giraud was born in Algeria in 1960. She has written five novels, La chambre des parents (Fayard, 1997), Nico (Stock, 1999), Marée noire (Stock, 2004), J'apprends (Stock, 2005), Une année étrangère (Stock, 2010) and a factual account, A présent (Stock, 2001) as well as L'amour est très surestimé (Stock) which won the 2007 Goncourt de la nouvelle.
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