What do you think?
Rate this book
Generator
« Je suis née en 1977 dans une centrale nucléaire, au sud de la Corée du Sud » : Rinny Gremaud n’aurait sans doute pas eu l’idée de ce livre si le président de son pays d’origine n’avait pas annoncé, quarante ans plus tard, la fermeture de Kori 1, « sa » centrale.
Installée en Suisse depuis son plus jeune âge, elle ne s’était jamais préoccupée de son père biologique, un ingénieur britannique avec qui sa mère avait eu une liaison alors qu’elle-même travaillait sur le chantier du réacteur.
Mais la dépêche marquant la fin d’un cycle, celui de l’utopie nucléaire, ébranle la narratrice au point qu’elle décide d’en savoir plus sur son géniteur. La voici à Holyhead, au pays de Galles, où il a vu le jour. La chance lui fait obtenir une adresse dans le Michigan. La lettre qu’elle écrit restant sans réponse, elle s’autorise à inventer une vie à cet homme qu’elle ne connaît pas et qui ne l’a jamais reconnue.
Les quelques jalons dont elle dispose déterminent les étapes de sa recherche : elle se retrouve à visiter les centrales où a travaillé l’ingénieur mécanicien reconverti dans le nucléaire, sur l’île d’Anglesey d’abord, puis à Taïwan et enfin, après la parenthèse coréenne, à Monroe, au bord du lac Érié.
Partie sur les traces d’un père, Rinny Gremaud va trouver des centrales atomiques.
Sans se départir de la distance et de l’ironie qui font le sel de ce livre, mais aussi sa grande pudeur, elle va magnifiquement entrelacer enquête journalistique et quête intime, faisant de ce generator un personnage de papier qui s’enrichit du silence de son modèle.
Installée en Suisse depuis son plus jeune âge, elle ne s’était jamais préoccupée de son père biologique, un ingénieur britannique avec qui sa mère avait eu une liaison alors qu’elle-même travaillait sur le chantier du réacteur.
Mais la dépêche marquant la fin d’un cycle, celui de l’utopie nucléaire, ébranle la narratrice au point qu’elle décide d’en savoir plus sur son géniteur. La voici à Holyhead, au pays de Galles, où il a vu le jour. La chance lui fait obtenir une adresse dans le Michigan. La lettre qu’elle écrit restant sans réponse, elle s’autorise à inventer une vie à cet homme qu’elle ne connaît pas et qui ne l’a jamais reconnue.
Les quelques jalons dont elle dispose déterminent les étapes de sa recherche : elle se retrouve à visiter les centrales où a travaillé l’ingénieur mécanicien reconverti dans le nucléaire, sur l’île d’Anglesey d’abord, puis à Taïwan et enfin, après la parenthèse coréenne, à Monroe, au bord du lac Érié.
Partie sur les traces d’un père, Rinny Gremaud va trouver des centrales atomiques.
Sans se départir de la distance et de l’ironie qui font le sel de ce livre, mais aussi sa grande pudeur, elle va magnifiquement entrelacer enquête journalistique et quête intime, faisant de ce generator un personnage de papier qui s’enrichit du silence de son modèle.
195 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 30, 2023
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 9, 2026
Generator is a restrained, intelligent work of autofiction that transforms nuclear power plants into unlikely emotional landmarks sites where personal history, geopolitical ambition, and inherited silence intersect.
Rinny Gremaud begins with an arresting fact: she was born in 1977 in a nuclear power plant in South Korea. When the reactor that framed her entry into the world is decommissioned decades later, the closure triggers a reckoning not only with the end of the nuclear utopia, but with the absence of her biological father, a British engineer who never acknowledged her existence.
Rather than offering a conventional search for the father narrative, Gremaud constructs something more oblique and quietly radical. The father remains largely unreachable, defined by silence and distance. In his place, the narrator follows his professional trail: power stations in Wales, Taiwan, South Korea, and the American Midwest. The result is a pilgrimage not toward a man, but toward systems machines built to promise control, progress, and permanence, all of which ultimately prove fragile.
What gives Generator its power is tone. Gremaud writes with precision, irony, and remarkable emotional restraint. The prose resists sentimentality, allowing gaps, unanswered letters, and imagined biographies to carry as much weight as documented fact. In inventing a life for the father who never claimed her, she exposes the strange intimacy of speculation and the freedom it can bring.
The book’s brilliance lies in its metaphorical layering. Nuclear plants become stand-ins for paternal absence: immense, carefully engineered, and dangerous when misunderstood. Gremaud’s investigation is as much about energy emotional, political, historical as it is about lineage.
Generator is a subtle, haunting meditation on origins, inheritance, and the stories we build when truth withholds itself. It will resonate with readers drawn to literary nonfiction that values nuance over revelation and silence over spectacle.
Rinny Gremaud begins with an arresting fact: she was born in 1977 in a nuclear power plant in South Korea. When the reactor that framed her entry into the world is decommissioned decades later, the closure triggers a reckoning not only with the end of the nuclear utopia, but with the absence of her biological father, a British engineer who never acknowledged her existence.
Rather than offering a conventional search for the father narrative, Gremaud constructs something more oblique and quietly radical. The father remains largely unreachable, defined by silence and distance. In his place, the narrator follows his professional trail: power stations in Wales, Taiwan, South Korea, and the American Midwest. The result is a pilgrimage not toward a man, but toward systems machines built to promise control, progress, and permanence, all of which ultimately prove fragile.
What gives Generator its power is tone. Gremaud writes with precision, irony, and remarkable emotional restraint. The prose resists sentimentality, allowing gaps, unanswered letters, and imagined biographies to carry as much weight as documented fact. In inventing a life for the father who never claimed her, she exposes the strange intimacy of speculation and the freedom it can bring.
The book’s brilliance lies in its metaphorical layering. Nuclear plants become stand-ins for paternal absence: immense, carefully engineered, and dangerous when misunderstood. Gremaud’s investigation is as much about energy emotional, political, historical as it is about lineage.
Generator is a subtle, haunting meditation on origins, inheritance, and the stories we build when truth withholds itself. It will resonate with readers drawn to literary nonfiction that values nuance over revelation and silence over spectacle.
January 8, 2026
Generator is a quietly arresting debut that fuses personal reckoning with global history, transforming nuclear power from an abstract system into something deeply human. Rinny Gremaud’s spare, precise prose carries the reader across continents and abandoned nuclear sites, each location resonating with emotional residue as much as technological legacy. The novel’s strength lies in its restraint: the narrator’s search for her estranged father unfolds through atmosphere, memory, and place rather than overt exposition, allowing absence itself to become a central presence.
What makes Generator especially compelling is its ability to hold multiple scales at once. Gremaud deftly intertwines the post World War II rise of nuclear energy with an intimate exploration of identity, inheritance, and belonging. The dormant facilities the narrator visits mirror the emotional silences she confronts, creating a powerful metaphorical symmetry. The result is a lyrical, reflective work that lingers one that will resonate with readers interested in literary fiction, science and society, and stories where history quietly shapes the present.
What makes Generator especially compelling is its ability to hold multiple scales at once. Gremaud deftly intertwines the post World War II rise of nuclear energy with an intimate exploration of identity, inheritance, and belonging. The dormant facilities the narrator visits mirror the emotional silences she confronts, creating a powerful metaphorical symmetry. The result is a lyrical, reflective work that lingers one that will resonate with readers interested in literary fiction, science and society, and stories where history quietly shapes the present.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews