The storm

In this work, Nobel Prize winner for Literature Le Clezio listens once again to voices that no one else can hear, and delves into the human psyche to grasp with all his senses, the human thread within it.

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Why do we always yearn to relive the past? Would we cling to it if it were fraught with wounds? And to what extent can we trust our memories?

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Two short novels* that delve into the concept of identity and involuntary, sensory-based memory, posing a profound question: Is it better to remember or to forget?

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In the first novel, “The Storm,” the sea and its women dominate… but it’s a sea that doesn’t allow for forgetting. Journalist Philip Keough, convicted of a crime he didn’t commit but witnessed, returns to it in search of a possible reconciliation with the past. He meets a fatherless young woman who reminds him of the woman he lived with there, on the Korean island of Udo, bordering the Sea of ​​Japan, thirty years ago. He also witnessed her eternal disappearance at sea. Between the voice of the young woman, “June,” and the voice of the journalist, “Philip,” there prevails a silence filled with everything but emptiness.

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In the second novel, "An Unknown Woman," the voice of Rachel emerges, a girl who, during a quarrel between her family, discovered a profound secret that shattered her being. Rachel decides to remain silent and, following her father's bankruptcy and the outbreak of war on the coast of Ghana, moves with her family to Paris, where she wanders the streets and squares of the French capital, only to be reborn in the final line.