La Tour, Les Choses, La Guerre

About this book

"Literature is the Word of a Time," wrote Hélène Bessette. Putting aside his novel, La Tour , one of the first to take for decoration and subject the consumer society, with The Things of Perec and The War of Clézio can verify this assertion by observing how part of the literature from the 60s to the 70s, it records and questions the socio-cultural and literary context in which it is written. Each book is enriched by the confrontation with the other two and these crossed views revive the last decade of the Thirty Glorious in its ambivalence. The poetics of the city, the representation of the things of the contemporary world, the variations from one work to another on the question of consumerist happiness present the play of the "Golden Sixties" in three acts: the aspiration to social climbing for all, the submergence of individuals by the excess of the products of the consumer society, the revolt of youth against this model of society, whose events of May 1968 were the catalyst. The three novelists capture the reality of the time in an original novelistic language and form that rethinks both the conventions of realism and the contributions of the "literature of suspicion". To underline the pioneering character of these "singular fictions", to associate Hélène Bessette with her illustrious successors, is to "render justice" to this unjustly forgotten author, and to give shape to her hope of being "recognized thirty or fifty years after her death."--Fabula