Rooms of the South

the Rooms of the South is the first novel of the French writer Laurence Cossé. He was published into 1981 with the editions Gallimard, in collection NRF; he obtained in 1981 the Prix Holy-Beuve and in 1982 the price Alice-Louis Barthou of the French Academy.

Summary

Analyzes

The poetic dimension of the style of this novel is essential. The ruptures of construction, the poetic licenses are numerous. One frequently finds worms white:

“These children are charming”, said the visitors. And some, which were believed perspicacious: “These children are malicious. ” Error! In both cases, error! We were stone-of iris and the spine-of-stag.
(chapter III)

I realized this summer that another way of going against the hour was to take it of slowness.
(chapter XIII)

The novel comprises also frequent poetic uses of the Paronomase; thus in last paragraph of chapter VII (which describes the frequent exits at sea that the four children make on a sailing ship), the last word is close by its sonorities to another word until one waits in this context:
the summer, the winter. All the year we digressed.
Cette evocation of another word that the word indeed present produces an effect of jamming poetic.

Incipit

When I look at this childhood, this adolescence, until certain night of the month of my sixteen years, it obviously appears to me which it is of another life that it acts.

I believe that I was born this night from the month of my sixteen years. Before I did not live. But I am not sure. It seems to me sometimes that at this point in time I lived, front. I died since.

This dubious night of Styx - but in which direction was my passage?

External bond

a comment of the novel

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