A puffed up house with the winds
a puffed up house with the winds is a work in two volumes of Emile Danoën which obtained the Prix of the populist novel in 1951 for the first volume.
The intrigue of a puffed up house to the winds is before and during the Second world war, in France.
Like he writes it as a foreword, Emile Danoën tries “to evoke in this book popular quarters destroyed by the bombardments. It is about a district of Le Havre, and which was however a piece of Brittany: the Saint-François district. I chose Saint-François because I am a child of Saint-François. Because I knew it better than any other district of France and the world. Because I liked it. It was necessary that it disappeared. It started to be high time that was demolished it to make of the nine. How not to recognize it: it turned to the collective slum. And I will not seek to embellish it nor to dissimulate his tares. I hate the picturesque one who attack the lungs. Nevertheless we would have preferred, us, its kids, that one was caught there differently than with blow bombs to clean it and cleanse it. ”
The May 11th 1935, at six o'clock in the evening, the inhabitants of the Havre are filled with enthusiasm arrival in the their port of most beautiful the Paquebot of the world whose baptism caused “conflicts of grammar divided the literary and linguistic authorities of France: was one to say Normandy, Normandy or simply Normandy? ”. Among them, occupants of the house of the title, before bad winds does not make it disappear: Adele Vittel who left her native Brittany in the beginning of the year 1900, to come to settle, among many its compatriots, in the Saint-François district as tenancière of a pancake shop which acts also as pension of sailors; his/her three children with the so different destinies, tragedy for one which sees his wife and its baby assassinated by his own brother and engages in the Guerre of Spain more by despair that by conviction; sordid for the brother player and criminal; hard for Marie who helps her mother in ungrateful tasks, a couple quarreller with a sailor forms who will become crippled and raises their two children Jeannot and Lucette. Never well far from Jeannot there is also the Lydie cousin raised by a sister of Adele to some streets of the house of the latter. It is generally following Jeannot and of Lydie that the reader penetrates in the middle of this Breton enclave in, territory of war of the kids, which will know the war of the adults and will see to scatter people and walls under the bombs, in 1940.
The second part of a puffed up house to the winds is entitled Idylle in a district walled .
One finds there Jeannot and Lydie which hide in the ruins of the Saint-François district - whose German occupants stopped the exits and makes evacuate the population - after they helped an English parachutist to turn over in his country. Then Jeannot manages to join the Résistance while Lydie is taken along in a Concentration camp… But they will return in the district of their childhood where “Jeannot had made feet and hands to reopen on its account old the pancake shop of his/her grandmother It had reached that point although one had answered him more once of the tasks more important than to open a pancake shop waited. With each one its task. Jean Berre did not feel not made for an exceptional destiny. And it is good that in this world which brews the virtues most authentic and the most exciting aspirations shovel-mixes with the crime, the horror and unconsciousness, some good people without claims worry to be used for the passers by, conscientiously, of quite honest crepes to butter and the quite fresh mackerel cracklings. ”
( a puffed up house with the winds is dedicated to Léna, girl of Theodore Botrel, which was the wife of Emile Danoën.)