Sometimes in the most agile form of a literature concise in its descriptions and agile in its development, we find ourselves with the weight of the deepest reflections.
That is in essence the formula of Jablonka, although more than a style it seems that it is simply a natural way of telling their stories, no matter how hard or intense those brushstrokes end up being that link the chapters from the subtle invitation to the reader to digest the scenes, the dialogues and the silences ...
Something similar happened with that other story by this author, a novel about the real case of the murder of a young woman named Laetitia that shook all of France. Sometimes Jablonka, Laura Restrepo with «The divine»Or even in rag With "In Cold Blood", they take a tour of the harshest reality and end up being impelled from its overimpression to novel the most horrifying. Perhaps to try to discern what remains of humanity on that road to perdition and the wildest of the worst of follies.
But this book is not a new account of the tragic. Not quite at least. Because the trip of the Jablonka family in a motorhome looks out into that paradise of childhood memories. Empowered in this case by the image of freedom and communion of a family launched to see the world through the south of a captivating Europe for all of them.
But of course the author, in such a personal story, also rescues that less friendly side. Because during that time of family leisure travel, of course the figures of their parents appear, especially that of their father, determined to burn happiness in his children. A childhood paradise from which he suffered when he was stripped of his parents in the abominable Nazi holocaust and on which the narrative gives a good account.
And the novel is composed precisely from those looks on both sides of the mirror, around a journey enjoyed to the extreme from the side of childhood and rescued in maturity by the same child who discovers new details in the memory of those parents far from the past.
The great memories of our life are flashes, perhaps idealized moments but evoked with that melancholy at times intoxicating. And Ivan is faithful to that fleeting construction of happiness, composing a jumping blog between memories, aromas, fleeting landscapes aboard the motorhome, conversations, songs and changing perspectives of childhood and maturity. A selective and fictionalized biography about one of those trips, those family adventures marked as essential passages in the book of our lives.
You can now buy En camping car, the new book by Ivan Jablonka, here: