Les Dynamiteurs

by Benjamin Whitmer, Jacques Mailhos (translator)

Une histoire d'amour déchirante, un roman noir qui aborde des thèmes universels (la corruption, la violence, l'initiation) et une plume exceptionnelle. Magnifique.

1895.
Le vice règne en maître à Denver, minée par la pauvreté et la violence. Une poignée d'orphelins s'est réfugiée dans une usine désaffectée. À leur tête, Cora les protège farouchement du haut de ses quinze ans, avec l'aide de Sam, un an de moins, éperdument amoureux d'elle. Sam est le seul qui sache lire : c'est ainsi qu'il devient l'interprète de Goodnight, un géant défiguré et muet, homme de main d'un gangster local.
Expéditions punitives, lynchages et explosions précipitent l'adolescent dans l'univers honni des adultes, qui le fascine et le repousse à la fois.
Au point de dynamiter son enfance, et de l'éloigner insidieusement de Cora.

319 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 19, 2021

About the author

Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he has been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He has also published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel.

He lives with his two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, blues bars, and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. Right now, he’s probably sitting with a book in hand, staring out his window and dreaming of a tar paper shack somewhere in the Rockies, about fifty miles removed from his nearest neighbor.