Les spectateurs

About this book

In the living room of a small apartment, a 13-year-old child, his little sister and his parents watch television. General de Gaulle, President of the Republic, gives a press conference which amazes them. The one of November 27, 1967. The child understands in live that one can have to leave his native country, like his parents driven from their home a few years earlier. Upset, he wants to know how it happened and questions this first exile. He asks them when and how we decide to leave, what we take in our suitcases, what we leave behind but, to all his questions, no one really answers, as if we were hiding something from him. The very evening of the conference, her mother confides in her neighbor Maria, a seamstress who makes all her dresses from those worn by the Hollywood stars of the 40s. Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Gene Tierney, figures that accompany her life and that she invokes at all times. On the other side of the wall, the child recreates the threats, the departure, the goodbyes, and succeeds in sewing the different parts of a story that intertwines love and secrecy, exile and cinema, the East and West ...--Translation of page 4 of cover by P.O.L.