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Lydinovo, Russia, 1950s. Aliosha, an idle young man, is sent to a labor camp on vaguely political charges. There he falls under the sway of a fellow prisoner, the boy, who is everything Aliosha is not: charismatic, determined and guilty of violent acts against the State. Literally spellbound, Aliosha copies everything the boy does. When the boy falls sick, Aliosha tends to him until the end.

Once freed and back in his home town, Aliosha meets Maria, the boy’s widow, who lives alone with her daughter, Ana. Their love affair completes the process of making Aliosha the one after: he literally becomes the boy, without our being able to determine what fascination, or what necessity, leads him to live another man’s life. Is the one after just a follower? Or will he in turn learn to forge his own life and his own fate?

In a radically spare style, the author plunges us into the fate of a sensitive character who is both humble and stubborn, who is looking for a way to live in the world.

A limpid, precise and sensual style. Overflowing with emotion delivered with taut, poetic restraint. The book’s backdrop is Soviet history and the immensity of Russian nature, in the midst of which, people have to try to to find their place, to live and to love.

Le Suivant -
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  • Buchet/Chastel
  • Littérature française
  • Publication date : 02/03/2017
  • Size : 14 x 18 cm, 128 p., 12,00 EUR €
  • ISBN 978-2-283-03026-4
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