From Publishers Weekly
"Love not often, but forever" is an adage with dangerous implications for Juliette, a gypsy acrobat in 17th-century France who strives to balance her wild yearnings with her hard-won wisdom in this passionate novel from the author of Chocolat and Five Quarters of the Orange. Harris gave hints in the latter novel of a darker sensibility, and she fully indulges that inclination here, broodingly exploring the mechanics of mass hysteria and the clash between the desires of the flesh and spiritual cravings. Juliette's involving narration alternates with the amoral reflections of her rogue lover, Guy LeMerle, the Blackbird ("He lived on perpetual credit and never went to church"). LeMerle is the leader of Juliette's troupe, which is disbanded after a clash with a town's authorities; at the same time, LeMerle abandons the pregnant Juliette, who is persecuted as a witch. Five years later, Juliette, now called Soeur Auguste, and her daughter, Fleur, have found refuge at the Abbey of Sainte-Marie-de-la-mer on the Brittany coast. Then LeMerle arrives at the abbey disguised as Father Confessor to the newly appointed abbess, Isabelle, a preternaturally severe girl of 12 whose uncle happens to be LeMerle's nemesis, the bishop of vreux. Isabelle causes Fleur to be removed from the abbey, and while Juliette struggles to get her back, LeMerle manipulates the nuns into believing Satan has their convent in thrall, in a complicated plot to revenge himself on the bishop. This fictional cassoulet suggests Aldous Huxley's nonfiction work The Devils of Loudun, with "demonically" possessed nuns caught in a web of sexual repression and political and religious oppression during an era of upheaval in France. Harris adds spicy characterizations, tart dark humor and seductively pungent prose, and poses some provocative questions: can 65 nuns be so easily misled? why does Juliette find herself drawn to such a selfish man? The title supplies an answer with almost unholy glee.
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From Booklist
Juliette, L'Ailee the Flying Harpy, Soeur Auguste: the central voice in this mesmerizing tale from the author of
Chocolat (1999) and
Five Quarters of the Orange (2001) has many names to match her many roles. They unfold slowly: she is in a seventeenth-century convent with her small daughter, hiding from a demon lover and her past as a dancer upon the rope. The convent, cut off by the tides twice a day from the mainland of France, is a hothouse of desire, ignorance, and woe, and into it comes a new abbess and her confessor. The abbess is barely more than a child, and the confessor is Juliette's lover, LeMerle the Blackbird, once again in brilliant disguise. The counterpoint between his evilly twisted manipulations of Juliette and her fellow sisters and Juliette's frantic working-out of just what he is doing and why--always colored by her desire for him--forms a seamless braid of first-person narratives. Harris' usual command of sense description does not fail her, ever, but the breathtaking denouement is marred by LeMerle's unremitting and soulless viciousness.
GraceAnne DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
de Diane Setterfield
de Joanne Harris
de Mary Ann Shaffer
