La Bleue Onze ANS Avec Lou

ELEVEN YEARS WITH LOUJean Dulac is eight years old when he and his family end up in an apartment block in the "Boulevard Circulaire" of Paris. It is the year of Stalin's death and of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. The Dulacs have just spent three years in Singapore where Lou, Dulac's father, was French naval attaché to the British governor. A white house surrounded by flowers, with a cook, a chauffeur, a housemaid and a Chinese Amah. The children played doctors and nurses, the adults tennis. Dulac feels disorientated in Paris. He is onvinced there is a king of France and speaks tortured French with an English accent. He is enrolled in a private schools, where his classmates' parents are counts, marquises, dukes, princes and even a maharajah. Dulac is a particularly nosey child, always on the lookout for mysteries on planet Dulac. He hovers by the door to the room where his mother and her friends smoke opium. Dulac gradually discovers the hidden face of his family. As time goes by, clouds start to appear. The family is having trouble making ends meet and the happiness they've managed to maintain is dwindling away. Jean carries on spying in the wings of the adult world at his own peril, during their shooting parties and opium evenings. When he is not allowed to move up to the next year at school, he is sent to a psychologist and spends his holidays with an aristocratic family in their chateau in the country. That autumn, Lou becomes more and more taciturn. On the morning of the second of January he kills himself in the cellar of their building. Jean Dulac has spent eleven years with Lou. Eleven Years with Lou is Bernard Chapuis's seventh novel. His other books published by Stock are L'Année dernière (1999), La Vie parlée (2005, Roger Nimier prize), Vieux Garçon (2007) and Le Rêve entouré d'eau (2009).

Bernard Chapuis (Auteur) - Verschenen op 08/02/2012 bij Stock