Night in the heart by Nathacha Appanah is shortlisted for France’s major literary prizes: Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina, Médicis, not to mention the Goncourt and Renaudot des lycéens, which will take her to meet young, sharp-witted readers across France. But what counts most is this clear, frank book, which explores and questions, with depth and delicacy, the various aspects of marital domination and feminicide. . Dominique Bellier
Three women ran off into the night to escape their partners’ violence. Two were shot or set alight. The one who escaped death is Nathacha Appanah, who, 27 years later, has accomplished the tour de force of making literature by expressing the unspeakable and by conducting a meticulous introspection and exploration of these three stories.
Although it tells how death ends up replacing love, although it describes the spiral of violence, the erasure and enslavement of three companions, offering a direct plunge into the darkness of the soul, this book enthrals with its depth, its luminous style and its delicacy. In her quest for the truth, Nathacha Appanah brings the two murdered women back to life, describing their personalities and tastes, refusing to reduce them to victims.
The author gives in to neither lyricism nor Manichaeism. She is unafraid of the complexity and monstrosity of reality. She meticulously observes and questions the feminicides inflicted on her cousin Emma, crushed and shot in 2000 in Mauritius, and on Shahinez Daoud, burned alive in 2021 in France. Having experienced it at first hand, she probes even more deeply the hold an older man exerted over her, the alienation and erasure gradually annihilating the young woman of her beginnings, ready to embrace the world.
Francesca Mantovani