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Barcelone années cinquante, le jeune Adrià grandit dans un vaste appartement ombreux, entre un père qui veut faire de lui un humaniste polyglotte et une mère qui le destine à une carrière de violoniste virtuose. Brillant, solitaire et docile, le garçon essaie de satisfaire au mieux les ambitions démesurées dont il est dépositaire, jusqu’au jour où il entrevoit la provenance douteuse de la fortune familiale, issue d’un magasin d’antiquités extorquées sans vergogne.
Un demi-siècle plus tard, juste avant que sa mémoire ne l’abandonne, Adrià tente de mettre en forme l’histoire familiale dont un violon d’exception, une médaille et un linge de table souillé constituent les tragiques emblèmes. De fait, la révélation progressive ressaisit la funeste histoire européenne et plonge ses racines aux sources du mal. De l’Inquisition à la dictature espagnole et à l’Allemagne nazie, d’Anvers à la Cité du Vatican, vies et destins se répondent pour converger vers Auschwitz-Birkenau, épicentre de l’abjection totale.
Confiteor défie les lois de la narration pour ordonner un chaos magistral et emplir de musique une cathédrale profane. Sara, la femme tant aimée, est la destinataire de cet immense récit relayé par Bernat, l’ami envié et envieux dont la présence éclaire jusqu’à l’instant où s’anéantit toute conscience. Alors le lecteur peut embrasser l’itinéraire d’un enfant sans amour, puis l’affliction d’un adulte sans dieu, aux prises avec le Mal souverain qui, à travers les siècles, dépose en chacun la possibilité de l’inhumain – à quoi répond ici la soif de beauté, de connaissance et de pardon, seuls viatiques, peut-être, pour récuser si peu que ce soit l’enfer sur la terre.

CONFESSIONS, JAUME CABRE

Adrià Ardevol is born into a loveless world. His father is harsh and distant; his mother almost entirely preoccupied with other things. In their Barcelona apartment, he learns to spy on their worlds, and to keep his feelings hidden, confiding only in his two small toys, a cowboy and an Indian chief. As he grows up, he comes to realise that his father’s obsession with antiques is not entirely innocent, and one of his father’s treasures, an 18th-century violin made by the master craftsman Lorenzo Storioni in Cremona, becomes central to his existence.

Although Adrià is the pivotal character in Cabré’s monumental novel, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, his is not the only narrative strand. In fact, the book begins with a village death in medieval times, and throughout we follow the fate of the hapless murderer, Jachiam of the Muredas, and the story of how he planted the tree from which the Storioni violin is made. In another medieval foray, the fate of monks in a remote monastery illustrates the violence of the past, and how those in power – at the time, the forces of the Inquisition – did not hesitate to use it to reinforce their position.

These stories are interwoven with similar skullduggery during the 18th century, when the violin falls into the hands of Parisian Monsieur Vial. But it is the manner in which it comes into Adrià’s father’s possession that inextricably intertwines the instrument’s journey with Adrià’s life. The violin’s fate is linked to the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule in occupied Europe, and with two doctors conducting experiments on Jewish children in Birkenau.

Cabré’s protagonist gradually becomes aware of the truth behind the violin’s past. The fact that it was extorted from victims of the Nazi horrors fills him with disgust, but also costs him the love of his life, the beautiful Jewish girl Sara. By the time the two of them meet, Adrià is a highly successful linguist, struggling to write about evil in a manuscript that turns out to be the novel itself.

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