mariebrunelm's Reviews (478)

Dr Erdmann is a not-yet-retired physicist teaching at university when he's not at his medicalised residence. The first time he experiences a kind of stroke that's not really a stroke, he blames it on his old age. But when it happens again, and seems to happen to other residents, he starts to think that something else might be afoot.
This is a novella touched with Sci-fi and the fantastical, taking place in a medicalised residence in which the imaginary things happen to old people. It reminded me a bit of the retirement home section in Cloud Atlas - a panel of different characters confronted with something threatening, but here the focus isn't so much about the fact that the staff won't help or believe them. We know from the start that there's something more to the cases touching the residents, only we don't know what. And at the end the novella can be read quite differently depending on your state of mind: a metaphor for grief, a Sci-fi exploration of consciousness, etc. 

Myri est une Arpenteuse. Ou du moins elle l'était avant de renoncer à son don, celui de visiter les rêves des dormeurs autour d'elle. Depuis, elle vit de débrouille dans les bas quartiers de Claren, où elle a rassemblé autour d'elle une famille de laissés-pour-compte. Mais alors que la pollution menace les fondements de la ville, et que des fantômes apparaissent et terrorisent les habitants, il est temps pour Myri de replonger dans les songes et d'y trouver sa voie.
Le dernier roman jeunesse d'Estelle Faye est une fois de plus une réussite. J'aurai lu un grand nombre de ses livres en 2021, avec un immense favori à la clé (Les Nuages de Magellan), et plein de belles découvertes (Un Reflet de Lune, Alduin et Léna). L'Arpenteuse de Rêves fait clairement partie de cette dernière catégorie. Les personnages y sont nombreux mais chacun a sa voix et son histoire. Les péripéties s'enchaînent sans temps mort, dans un rythme qui m'a rappelé Un Eclat de Givre. Les thèmes sont également proches d'Un Eclat de Givre : la ville omniprésente, le personnage principal en fuite, et surtout en fuite d'iel-même, les créatures aquatiques, le théâtre (au sens propre et figuré), etc.
Enfin, mais non des moindres, je suis absolument sous le charme de cette couverture.
Rep : personnage principal lesbien, personnage secondaire noir.

Power dynamics shift and collapse in the second volume of the Liveship Traders trilogy. New characters are introduced, others disappear only to reveal worse dangers than the ones they embodied. 
Robin Hobb's character writing shines particularly brightly in the sequel to Ship of Magic. I'm thinking of one in particular, whom I can't stand in book 1 but start to tolerate i' book 2 (and will end up loving in book 3). I can't even imagine the effort it must have taken to orchestrate such a masterful chorus of voices, but it works. Now that we are more familiar with names and characters, the deeper currents of the story start to move closer to the surface and big mysteries are glimpsed through the moving tide. 
CW: closed spaces, sexual assault, slavery, rape.

In a series of chapters like items on a menu, mangaka Jirō Taniguchi and writer Masayuki Kusumi take the reader on a culinary trip to Japan, dismissing the fancy restaurants for more traditional and local spots. We follow the main character, a quiet salesman, as he visits new places or neighbourhoods he hasn't set foot in in a long time, and seeks out places to eat. Each dish is pictured in detail, considered thouroughly by the customer, and enjoyed with more or less pleasure. It's a fascinating insight into Japanese cuisine and sociology, an invitation to sit back, relax and enjoy the slow passing of time. The experience was not as satisfying to me as it could have been since I'd never tasted even one of the many dishes mentioned, but I'm sure the careful pen work and textual descriptions will bring vivid memories back to those of you who have.

Niché au coeur d'une forêt de pins à l'odeur entêtante, le domaine des Marchère attend sa nouvelle maîtresse. La jeune Aimée vient d'épouser le propriétaire et découvre entre ses murs froids une vie d'épouse sur laquelle plane des secrets. Candre, son mari, a en effet perdu sa première femme quelques années plus tôt, le laissant sans enfants. Un parti idéal pour la jeune femme, en apparence...
Ce roman de Cécile Coulon est un hommage appuyé à deux grands classiques de la littérature anglaise : Jane Eyre et Rebecca. C'est d'ailleurs ce qui m'a attiré vers lui, tout en attisant ma méfiance : que pouvait apporter de plus l'autrice à des romans déjà si hypnotiques? Pour mon plus grand bonheur, la prose superbe de Cécile Coulon m'a immédiatement embarquée dans le Jura du 19e siècle, et j'ai suivi avec délices les variations de l'autrice sur le thème de la jeune ingénue mariée à un veuf. Elle peint des portraits puissants de personnages complexes, qui se rapprochent et se déchirent dans ce récit profondément féministe. Un vrai régal, seulement troublé par une fin beaucoup trop abrupte à mon goût (mais c'est en partie dû au fait que je ne voulais pas voir l'histoire se terminer).
Rep : personnage queer (son orientation n'est pas définie, mais elle n'est pas hétéro).

Dans ma quête de livres tournant autour de la gastronomie, j'ai emprunté ce roman français racontant le parcours d'une cheffe fictive. En réalité, Marie Ndiaye raconte tout autant le personnage de la Cheffe que celui du narrateur, un de ses employés qui nourrissait une passion amoureuse non réciproque pour elle. Il se raconte, et la raconte, dans le format d'un entretien, comme si les lecteurices tenaient le micro et posaient les questions (non relayées dans le texte). C'est donc un long monologue qui est donné à lire, entrecoupé de scènes narrées que j'ai eu du mal à placer en contexte tant elles diffèrent du reste.
Plus que le portrait d'une cheffe, le livre donne à voir l'image qu'en a cet homme qui a recueilli plusieurs semaines durant les confidences de sa supérieure lorsqu'ils travaillaient ensemble dans son restaurant. Cela passe par de nombreuses et longues digressions, comme un flux de pensée, servi par des phrases parfois longues d'une demi-page, dans lesquelles je me perdais souvent et devais revenir en arrière pour comprendre leur structure. Outre les portraits psychologiques que j'ai trouvé bien brossés, j'ai eu du mal avec la prose : le format du monologue / de l'entretien appelait à mon humble avis un style plus oral, tandis qu'ici il était très écrit.
Rep : personnage asexuel & aromantique? Les termes ne sont pas utilisés mais plusieurs formulations laissent peu de doute. 

In this very bookish adventure, we follow Elisabeth, a guardian-in-training who sees the safe boundaries of her world crumble down when her beloved library is attacked by a monster trapped so far within the pages of a book. Although she manages to defeat it and escape with her life, nothing is the same anymore. With the head of the library gone, she is suspected of dark intentions and has to prove her innocence at the capital city. 
This story is quite fun and lively, with a nice feminist undertone. I do wish the heroin's training appeared more in her actions. We are told she's training as a guardian to work in a library, but the focus is put so much on what she doesn't know and is mysterious that I couldn't fathom what she did know. There was a rather cliché romance with a brooding and tortured man, but it wasn't overly fast. What annoyed me more was how the heartless demon was said not to be interested in sex, which is a very human, asexual trait too often pasted onto psychopaths and evil beings, and how beauty was always related to the palest skin tone possible. 
All in all, if you can get past a few tropes ("she released the sigh she didn't know she'd been holding"), it's a fun page-turner with a heroin who knows what she wants. 
Rep: bi secondary (important) character, blind secondary character. 

The third volume in Madeleine and Madame Pamplemousse's adventures is just as sweet as the previous one. This time the danger comes from sweet treats hiding a darker heart. I enjoyed the fact that this book blended fantastical elements with down-to-earth troubles, this time bullying at school. Once again, I found Madeleine rather passive for most of the story, but she gained independence by the end and that was nice. Something felt a little off with the narration, maybe a little disjointed, but it was fine. 

This book is very short, but it undoubtedly is one of the heaviest and most dense I've read this year. It includes absolutely horrendous descriptions of war crimes, so check the content warnings below. I will not refer explicitly to these in my review, but I wish I'd had a note at the beginning of the book. 
The Man Who Ended History is an absolutely fascinating little book in many ways. It reads like the transcription of a TV documentary juxtaposing interviews, voice-overs and textual descriptions of visual material presented on screen. This apparent distance helps tell about the atrocities committed during the China-Japan War in the 1930s, but no distance can really prepare you for the horrors of the Japanese camps. The most chilling part may be that most of the accounts presented here are taken from historical sources and have nothing fictitious, despite this book being marketed as Sci-fi. 
The premise is that a Japanese-American physicist, a woman, and a Chinese-American historian, a man, have developed a tool to witness historical events as if one were transported then and there. From then, the documentary focuses on the ethical and philosophical issues raised by this endeavour, since the historian decided to give this opportunity to families of victims rather than scholars, and that each "time-travel" destroys the possibility to visit each time period a second time.
There is a lot to talk about from such a small volume. One huge caveat I must raise, however, is that once again the author is determined to minimise the role of women, as he'd done in The Grace of Kings. First in the title itself : the man of the title is the historian, but without the woman physicist none of the experiment would have been possible. Secondly, the form is a documentary which means that everything is presented very neutrally. Then why is there an italicized description of the physicist making comments on her beauty?? It has absolutely nothing to do here, and yet it's the very first sentence of the book. This baffles me. I know after The Grace of Kings I'd said I'd stay away from Ken Liu in the future, but this book had been heavily recommended and it sounded too interesting to pass. Which it is, undeniably. 
Additional TW for mutilation and vivisection. 

The first time I read The Liveship Traders trilogy, I was baffled by the complexity of the narrative and how different it was from the Farseer trilogy. I know a few readers who have preferred Liveship Traders because of its variety, and I certainly praise that, but I've always felt a deeper attachment to Fitz and the Fool. However, re-reading Liveship made me realise just how stunning this book was. Yes it's complex, but I appreciated it a lot more knowing from the first pages who was whom and I loved the hints at where the story was going. I hadn't realised the first time round how the whole 800-page volume was about slavery. It's certainly obvious, but I'd been so focused on understanding what was happening the first time that it had slipped my attention.