L’immense fatigue des pierres

Still on the theme of World War II novels, I had to read this text by Régine Robin in a class. Fascinating woman: born in France to a Polish Jewish family in 1939, former professor at UQAM in sociology, historian, who wrote a history of linguistics and who writes novels. So she lived through the Shoah in the early years of her life. The book talks about it, but I decided not to include it in my previous list, because it is so original that to classify it would not be to fully honor it.

Summary

It is very difficult to offer a conclusive summary. We can say, however, that the book is composed of texts that are similar to short stories, but that names, characters and places recur. In one of these texts, clearly inspired by the author's memories, a little Jewish girl has to hide in a garage to avoid being rounded up. In another, the granddaughter of a woman who lived in Poland before the Shoah is in conflict with her mother and tries to reconnect with her grandmother's memory. In another, a literature professor creates an alias on the Internet that turns out to be a little too realistic. In another, a writer tries to write about her missing family members.

All of these texts have one thing in common: they deal with memory. All of these texts address, through fiction, the issues facing Holocaust survivors and their descendants, including issues of identity, memory and language.

Impressions

This book impressed me a lot. Régine Robin has put her finger on an aspect that interested me a lot without knowing it: the difficulty of correctly representing emotionally charged memories. How, indeed, can we pass on to readers who are strangers to our reality emotions that we feel or that we have felt ourselves? How to build a story that pays tribute to these people of the past and to these memories without falling into mawkishness? It is very difficult. And in the case of an event as vast and traumatic as the Shoah, if we are not ourselves survivors and can hardly add anything to the many existing testimonies, perhaps it is simply impossible.

So the author decided to simply not do it. Rather than an autobiography, she wrote a novel. Rather than constructing one story, she wrote several, in various forms. Rather than trying to bring tears to our eyes, she tried to give an account, to let us understand for ourselves.

I thought this book was brilliant. It was dense. It made me think a lot. It would certainly deserve a second reading.