The list of the morning
A variegated population crowds in the selection of the “world of books”: a seal, you, which is at the center of an exciting test of anthropologist Fabien Clouette; The thugs and marginalized from the first novel by the Irishman Colin Barrett; The characters of the new novel by Delphine Grouès, haunted, under the Blizzard which sweeps away Patagonia, by the memory of political violence; A young woman tormented by the absence, heroine of the first novel by the Englishman Siân Hughes; Finally, killers and some vigilantes in the new thriller, in two volumes, of Jean-Christophe Grangé, Sunlesslocated at the start of AIDS years.
ESSAY. “Oceanic lives”, by Fabien Clouette
Everything is singular at You, until his name, born from a joke of surfers who used to meet this very young gray seal on a beach in Gironde, resting on their boards, sticking on the back of divers: they had made it the “you”, and it is under this nickname that the phocidé became famous.
You is one of the protagonists of the first try of anthropologist Fabien Clouette, the exciting Oceanic livesalongside other marine mammals that behave “Other than what we know about them”. So you, as it grows, becomes a bit bulky. When he nibbles while playing, he hurts. When he rushes on a surfer, he terrifies him.
We decide to isolate him in a basin, before sending him to join the seal colonies. It is a question of returning it to its “phocity”. It is true that, released, he mixes with his fellows and seems to live like them. But soon we see him looking for the proximity of humans, sticking on the back of divers … You are you. We cannot cure him of himself. And we come back to the starting point: the character of this particular individual.
This is the nodal point of the book, the question towards which all the stories he retraces. Nothing says “That all seals [n’ont pas] this capacity, that all animals [ne sont pas] “Singular Animals” ”. Still we have to make ourselves available to these new meetings. This is what Fabien Clouette highlights: the appearance of a sensitivity, not only to animal life, but to animal individuals. These are no longer content to embody their species. They are there, in front of us, and our representations are upset. Fl. Go.
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