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La Grande patience #2
Celui qui voulait voir la mer
Julien Dubois a dix-sept ans en 1940. L'apprenti pâtissier en toque et veste blanches qui rêve de découvrir le monde devient un homme.
Sur le Jura où habitent le père et la mère Dubois, déferle le flot de l'exode. Avant l'arrivée de troupes allemandes, Julien, comme tous les garçons de son âge, part sur les routes. Commence alors, pour ses vieux parents, la longue attente angoissée du retour de l'enfant "qui voulait voir la mer".
Après "La maison de autres", Bernard Clavel poursuit la chronique d'une petite ville durant les heures noires de la débâcle et trace, avec sa sympathie profonde pour les humbles, un inoubliable portrait de mère.
Bernard Clavel a été désigné par un sondage Sofres comme un des trois écrivains préférés des Français.
Roman autobiographique devenu un classique, "La grande patience" inaugure une œuvre de quatre-vingt titres.
Sur le Jura où habitent le père et la mère Dubois, déferle le flot de l'exode. Avant l'arrivée de troupes allemandes, Julien, comme tous les garçons de son âge, part sur les routes. Commence alors, pour ses vieux parents, la longue attente angoissée du retour de l'enfant "qui voulait voir la mer".
Après "La maison de autres", Bernard Clavel poursuit la chronique d'une petite ville durant les heures noires de la débâcle et trace, avec sa sympathie profonde pour les humbles, un inoubliable portrait de mère.
Bernard Clavel a été désigné par un sondage Sofres comme un des trois écrivains préférés des Français.
Roman autobiographique devenu un classique, "La grande patience" inaugure une œuvre de quatre-vingt titres.
448 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 16, 2020
Très intéressant. Je vais lire la suite Série en 4tomes
August 6, 2016
Un bon souvenir de lecture adolescente.
April 3, 2023
Une ode a l'angoisse d'une mère et la pudeur d'un père attendant le retour du fils parti en vélo lors de la débâcle. "Pourquoi ne revient-il pas avec les autres?"
Très prenant..
Très prenant..
August 23, 2021
Second in the series, this book takes us deeper into la famille DuBois at a most disruptive time, both in their lives and in history, itself. The elder Dubois are struggling with age, a caustic if enduring relationship fraught with tension over their children, their limited means and the impact of the Nazis impending and eventual occupation of their town.
As with the other two books I've read so far, (I read the last one first!) nothing grand happens in this novel. Julien, the younger son, moves in and out of his parents' lives, bringing to the fore tensions between le monsieur et la madame about their loyalty to and trust in their children (one son is his by an earlier marriage and Julien theirs together). In this, the third book in the series, you are finally introduced to the elder brother and his wife, two seemingly vain and self-centered individuals, whose actions bring a profound and palpable level of strain between the elder DuBois, one that threatens to destroy either their parents' marriage or maybe their lives.
Clavel's talent is simply to make you want to continue reading about these people who you don't particularly like, who live with an acute degree of personal anguish and interpersonal stress, in an emotionally charged time. You should want to run from these books! But, he captures their humanity, in the little exchanges, in the slow unveiling of a "love" that lives more on the strength of a shared history that begets loyalty, more than shared interests or concerns or, for that matter, affection.
Beware, though. There is a sadness that pervades all of these books. Sure, times are tough, and the Dubois' circumstances are not the stuff of fairy tales, but it is more than that. Clavel's characters are revealed almost exclusively thinking about themselves. Not selfishly, per se, but they are always focused on how they are feeling, what pains they have, how angry they are about what the other is saying, what they have to defend. The Dubois have friends (or at least neighbors) and they do good deeds, but Clavel writes them only coping with their own frailties, their own anger, their own emptiness. I can recall no empathetic gesture, no reaching across the emotional aisle. This, I now realize, weighs as a real burden on the reader. It weighs you down like the heavy grey skies and the drip of the water in the rain barrel and the slow, inexorable decline of the Dubois' vitality.
Still, you read on because the writing is good and the gray, dull, heavy burden of being human is so satisfyingly explored.
As with the other two books I've read so far, (I read the last one first!) nothing grand happens in this novel. Julien, the younger son, moves in and out of his parents' lives, bringing to the fore tensions between le monsieur et la madame about their loyalty to and trust in their children (one son is his by an earlier marriage and Julien theirs together). In this, the third book in the series, you are finally introduced to the elder brother and his wife, two seemingly vain and self-centered individuals, whose actions bring a profound and palpable level of strain between the elder DuBois, one that threatens to destroy either their parents' marriage or maybe their lives.
Clavel's talent is simply to make you want to continue reading about these people who you don't particularly like, who live with an acute degree of personal anguish and interpersonal stress, in an emotionally charged time. You should want to run from these books! But, he captures their humanity, in the little exchanges, in the slow unveiling of a "love" that lives more on the strength of a shared history that begets loyalty, more than shared interests or concerns or, for that matter, affection.
Beware, though. There is a sadness that pervades all of these books. Sure, times are tough, and the Dubois' circumstances are not the stuff of fairy tales, but it is more than that. Clavel's characters are revealed almost exclusively thinking about themselves. Not selfishly, per se, but they are always focused on how they are feeling, what pains they have, how angry they are about what the other is saying, what they have to defend. The Dubois have friends (or at least neighbors) and they do good deeds, but Clavel writes them only coping with their own frailties, their own anger, their own emptiness. I can recall no empathetic gesture, no reaching across the emotional aisle. This, I now realize, weighs as a real burden on the reader. It weighs you down like the heavy grey skies and the drip of the water in the rain barrel and the slow, inexorable decline of the Dubois' vitality.
Still, you read on because the writing is good and the gray, dull, heavy burden of being human is so satisfyingly explored.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews