“Les Routis”, by Damien Ribeiro, Roerg, 224 pages, €20, digital €16.
David pretends not to bother anyone “Flee from dictatorship”. What other reason could push the Portuguese, in September 1973, into exile in France with his wife and children? Once the “Carnation Revolution” ended Salazar’s dictatorship on April 25, 1974, he returned to the country. His son, Fernando, who knows nothing of the true reasons for this family’s relocation, chooses to stay in France, become a bricklayer and marry a French woman. Father and son rarely see each other again. Arthur, Fernando’s son, wouldn’t even speak a word of Portuguese.
In his beautiful second novel, waysDamien Ribeiro reviews with remarkable precision the paths taken by three generations of the same family as the bond of filiation seems to be broken. Whether they live in two different countries, like David and his son, or under one roof, like Fernando and Arthur, none of the men of this type recognize themselves in the choices and ways of being their parents. Under the subtle, sympathetic pen of Damien Ribeiro, they both believe in their individual dreams and decisions, but find themselves more defined by their genealogies than they’d like. Who will he face now? »Fernando wonders when his father will die. Leaving him now, this bastard would deprive him of vengeance, of that procession he had imagined driving a new Mercedes through the village, dressed as a prince, Helen at his side, dressed as a doctor’s wife, the little one behind them, dressed as a Frenchman. »
Damián Ribeiro’s novel, described in this way, would seem to take the overly specific paths of Oedipus’ tragic scheme. ways It is never reduced at any time. On the contrary, its strength, originality and suggestive power are due to the way the writer breaks the continuity of the story, making it completely unexpected. Organizing back and forth between countries and eras, from 1955 to 1995, blurring any chronology, the novel prefers to weave, sometimes loosely, sometimes narrowly, important episodes from the protagonists’ lives. Hence he makes this failed filiation at once delicate, this rejected transfer and the tenuous thread that may still connect their respective destinies.
slices of life
By isolating these episodes from each other and arranging them side by side, like many bricks in the same edifice, Damián Ribeiro gives them an independent poetic value, adding without heaviness to the function they occupy in the logic of the story. The reader takes pleasure in discovering these slices of life, in absorbing the cultural and mental world to which they bear witness, and in noticing the signs of tragedy that they discreetly proclaim.
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