The night has just fallen on Rennes, the writer that everyone is waiting for should not delay. In the room, about sixty readers. A French teacher corrects her copies of 1 with a red penD. A 27-year-old young man, shaved head and glasses, put on a nice shirt, a suit and drove more than an hour from Saint-Brieuc to listen to the one whose last book he has just started. A graduate in history and looking for a job, Jocelyn Emmanuel had never read anything by her. It was a feminist friend, a fan of the author, who told him about it this summer, and he was won over: “I have to moderate myself, to slow down the reading to savor. It’s so rare for a book to be so gripping. » It’s 6:05 p.m. Black and white checkered skirt, white collar on a black sweater, black varnish and blonde fringe, here, in a two-tone version, Lola Lafon.
This November 17, she presents When you listen to this song (Stock, 250 pages, 19.50 euros), during a meeting at Espace West France organized by the bookstore Le Failler.
For this story published by the Ma nuit au musée collection, which invites, as its name suggests, writers to spend an entire night alone in the space of a museum, she chose the Anne-Frank House, in Amsterdam . Lola Lafon recounts her night spent in the Annex, this 40 square meter hiding place where Anne Frank, her sister Margot, their parents and four friends, all Jews, lived for twenty-five months without making a sound, from July 1942 to August 1944, before being deported by the Nazis. Only Otto Frank, the teenager’s father, will survive and have his writings published.
Of Anne Frank, everyone knows this Log, but who knows that we have mostly retained a watered down, smoothed version, in the name of reconciliation. In the 1950s, the producer who adapted it for Broadway thus found the text “too sad, too Jewish”, explains Lola Lafon. “The image of Anne Frank on the cover of her newspaper, the photo of the smiling young girl, can help us. That night, I didn’t work things out. » Horror, Lola Lafon wants to say it, write it. “We know everything about her, except her death, she observes. The two sisters died of typhus, they had no more hair, they had no more teeth. In Bergen-Belsen. » The audience listens, speechless, the French teacher takes notes.
The writer is the first to be surprised by this fall success: “With this book, something is happening. »
It can’t be seen, but Lola Lafon “is loose”. She hasn’t slept all night, has stiff neck and back pain. She continues to meet, Brest the day before, Toulouse, Montreuil and Paris the following week, Nantes then… The writer is the first to be surprised: “With this book, something is happening. » Already, the 52-year-old author discovers readers. She knew the readers, the readers, less. A committed feminist, the one who, in her novels, focuses on the gaze placed on the figure of the young girl and who very early wrote on sexual violence is carried by the #metoo movement.
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