“I’m learning Hebrew” by Denis Lachaud
“J’apprends l’hébreu” (I’m learning Hebrew) is not a language manual, but Denis Lachaud’s new novel.
It plunges us into the fragility of a teenager in search of his bearings. This teenager is Frédéric, whose childhood is marked by his father’s professional transfers, and thus by multiple moves. Little by little, Frédéric develops serious communication problems. At the age of seventeen, Frédéric has lost his sense of sentence, and only words reach him, separately. After Paris, Oslo and Berlin, it’s to Israel that he must now follow his family. At first, Tel-Aviv appears to be a confusing place that he’ll have to master. The family arrives in Tel Aviv, and the young man discovers the uniqueness of Israel. A country and a language that he could perhaps finally make his own, because so close to him in their complex relationship to identity, territory and belonging. Reassured, he sets off with a Dictaphone to meet the inhabitants of Tel Aviv, to ask them about their history and their relationship with this state of contradictions and hopes.
With this book, Denis Lachaud continues his reflection on language and its relationship to identity. But this novel is also about the tormented history of Israel. Lachaud offers us a poetic definition of the notion of territory. The book also takes an original look at adolescence.
In short, Denis Lachaud is an author worth discovering. His nuanced writing explores both the interior of human beings and the places that surround them, and prompts the reader to question the transformation of human beings as a function of their environment.
“J’apprends l’hébreu” by Denis Lachaud
Actes Sud
18.50 euros
Julien Tissot
[email protected]
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
