"The Little Second Hand | Lesbre"

THE LITTLE HAND OF THE CLOCK. Out of habit, I had started the watch. The ticking had emerged with an unexpected violence. I had thought I wouldn't survive this almost imperceptible noise, this inexorable pace of the little hand that made me dizzy. Thirty years after his death, my father was leaving me once again. The pain had entered me all at once. Since she found this watch, the narrator had set herself in motion: following an implacable impulse, she visits houses, as if to find the place of a missed appointment. As she reaches the end of her improbable quest, the present increasingly replaces, in a series of smooth transitions, scenes from her past life: in the hotel where she stayed, the big orange cat reminds her of someone waiting somewhere, but also of her childhood playmate - her neighbor's footsteps overlap with her father's, heavy with grief - her mother's shadow, a frivolous silhouette, lingers. In the seaside house, the final stage of the journey, the surge of memories overwhelms her: images of her childhood that began with the war, those of the only family vacations, a disaster, those of house sketches as well, drawn by a sad and mysterious father, who died too soon but with whom she never stopped conversing. Gradually, before our eyes, and almost without the narrator's knowledge, a magnificent and subtle novel of origins is constructed: the threads of her life untangle, her commitments are illuminated by the ideas she suspects were her father's, and she finally finds peace. Michèle Lesbre has never gone so far in intertwining her intimate experience and fiction, and she has never shown so clearly the redemptive power of words, which she weaves like a spell. Michèle Lesbre lives in Paris. The Little Hand of the Clock is her ninth novel.