“We are very pleased that this award crowns a foreigner who has fallen in love with the French language and adopted it to the point of writing in French, to be published by editions Gallimard, and today be recognised at its fair value in the profession of the booksellers,” said Nathalie Iris, president of the Prix des libraires, rewarding Wednesday night by japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi for the sixth book broken Soul.
It has been preferred to those of Santiago Amigorena, The Ghetto inside (P. O. L), Michel Bernard, Good Sense (The round Table), Catherine Blondeau, Beginners (mémoire d’encrier) and Caroline Lawrence who comes, for his part, to win the prize of the houses of the press in order to Shore of wrath (Stops.)
Upon reentry, Tahar Ben Jelloun said here all the good he thought of the novel Mizubayashi, already awarded the prize to readers of Writers of the South (Aix-en-Provence) and that of the city of Deauville (Festival Books and Music).
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This is a classic novel. A language elegant, a history wide and very moving. It is a novel about the music, on the transmission, on the war, on the fidelity of the origins, about friendship, about the beauty of the silence that follows a Schubert sonata.
The story begins on a November 6, 1938 in Tokyo. Rei, the main character, is 11 years old. His father, Yu, and three chinese visitors began the string quartet in a minor opus 19 Schubert, said ” Rosamunde “, when the soldiers invade the house, break the violin of the father (that’s him, ” broken soul “) and arrest everyone, except Rei, which is hidden in a cabinet. The lieutenant Kurokami, who command the soldiers, is a music lover. He picks up the violin and entrust it to the child hidden.
Rei not see his father. Japan at the time was in war with China. The child will be adopted by a French family. He will keep with him the rest of the violin, and spent part of his life to restore this instrument is highly symbolic. This violin broken is the wound of his life.
Sixty years later, he returned to Tokyo with a violin repaired, the offer to the daughter of the lieutenant Kurokami. Touching scenes where transmission continues in spite of the time, the war and other accidents of life.
The love of the music against the sound of boots
I was overwhelmed by this novel, a great and beautiful depth.
Like all those who write in a language that is not naturally theirs, Akira Mizubayashi is scrupulous. One feels that he loves the French language and the respect. I found his style simple and stripped bare. But the most important thing in this book, through the story of a violin broken by the brutality, it is that human relations are restored by the love of the music. Rei will James, in reference to the great violinist Jacques Thibaud ; and it will-maker to “make the sounds of the soul” and make the acquaintance of Helen, a archetière. Their love story is very well suggested. Their relationship with the music going on by the manufacturing of the instruments. Jacques discovers pernambuco, a wood introduced in France in the Eighteenth by François Xavier Tourte, a tree that only grows in Brazil. Having no one with whom to speak japanese, he undertakes to write it in order not to lose any in excelling in French. Their mourning will be turned off when it has reconstituted the violin broken. The trip to Japan with his wife, Helen, is moving. The memory of long-ago days was reborn with its perfumes, its music and its pain.
Soothing
broken Soul is a fine tribute to the fidelity, to the memory of those who, like his father, disappeared, victims of terrible cruelties that man alone is capable of inflicting on his fellow man. Fortunately, in front, there is the life, the inner life, there is music that expresses both the most black of melancholy that the deepest joy.
I saw one of the echoes in the world today. Identity-based isolationism and the refusal of the other that lead to the noises of the boots, to the war.
This is a novel which portrays the art in the face of violence, art as a universal sharing. The art, such as reconciliation, the art of reconciliation. In short, the art against hatred. There is a lot of peace and serenity in this novel, in spite of the extreme pain. The book itself becomes a sort of ointment very soft, both soothing and moving.
broken Soul, Akira Mizubayashi, Gallimard, 256 p, 19 euros.
