Je ne retrouve personne by Arnaud Cathrine

Je ne retrouve personne Reviews

• 
  Anaïs (Taylor's Version)

  2.5
  J'aime toujours autant l'écriture d'Arnaud Cathrine mais après avoir lu 9 de ses livres, certaines réflexions, intrigues, tournures de phrases ou même certains personnages deviennent un peu redondants, ce qui fait que je n'arrive plus à être surprise.
• 
  Denis

  Arnaud Cathrine is possibly the most delicate, humble, and sensitive French observer – and poet, I’d almost add - of the sweet, banal, bittersweet melancholy that can envelop our daily lives. This book – whose title means: “I cannot find anyone” – reads in two hours. It is short, there isn’t much of a plot (a man goes back, at the demand of his family, to the house by the sea where he grew up to organize its selling), and the writing is deceptively simple. That’s exactly why this novel works as it does – liberating, through a spare prose, the charms of an ineffable sadness that one can also find in many French songs (I read this book while listening to the iconic singer Benjamin Biolay: quite a perfect soundtrack for such a novel). “Je ne retrouve personne” follows its own tempo (somewhere in between the so-called “little music” of Françoise Sagan and the metaphysical wanderings of Patrick Modiano) and it is beautifully effective. Memories of childhood, the landscape of a youth gone by, the house where one grew up, silhouettes from the past… There’s something very French, in Cathrine’s universe, a cloudy greyness that hangs over his characters and over the Normandy coast - where the story takes place - which seems very much part of the French psyche: it offers to the French reader facets of a melancholy that feels strangely familiar and personal. Cathrine is very good at unveiling, discreetly, almost furtively, the little (and not so little) disappointments of adult life, of family ties, of time passing by. Through impressionistic touches, he deftly surfs those big themes, with much precision and a great sense of atmosphere, and he reveals in a few words how the simplest moments of our lives can be filled with intense sorrow. Happiness is fleeting, yet real and delicious when it is grasped. But tragedy is never very far, and sometimes nobody sees it coming: there is a revelation toward the end of this book that underlines how much a most ordinary life can be synonymous with unexpressed pain and longing. Cathrine’s novel may appear very modest, compared to some of the big, ambitious, decidedly more literary novels that are being published with great fanfare in France and elsewhere. And it is modest, I suppose, but it so in a lovely way. Cathrine's capacity to unearth the most evanescent of all emotions, melancholy, is the mark of a very gifted and sincere writer.
• 
  Louise

  J’ai étonnamment vraiment beaucoup aimé. On retrouve certains des clichés des écrivains contemporains qui m’agacent habituellement mais le thème du retour au pays était trop beau pour que je m’y laisse pas prendre. Et certes Arnaud Cathrine est d’une délicatesse qui est follement séduisante et qui rattrape beaucoup de choses. Juste un peu déçue de la fin. Comment ça on vend quand même la maison ?
  La langue quant à elle n’est pas transcendantale mais juste et belle.
• 
  Delphine Tran

  Ce livre est plein de mélancolie. Arnaud Cathrine y décrit de manière merveilleuse les sentiments de ce personnage qui revient sur son passé et qui s interroge sur ce qu'il était et ce qu'il est devenu...
• 
  Chloe

  Bien écrit, nous plonge bien dans le décor de la cote normande. Les personnages sont intéressants et attachants pour certains, une lecture simple et agréable.
• 
  Zéro Janvier

  Joli livre sur le retour aux sources, la nostalgie, les regrets.