Chavirer de Lola Lafon
In 1984, thirteen-year-old Cléo, who lives a modest life in the Paris suburbs with her parents, is offered a grant by a mysterious foundation to help her realise her dream of becoming a modern jazz dancer. But it's a trap, a sexual trap, a money-making trap, that closes in on her and into which she will draw other schoolgirls.
In 2019, a file of photos is found on the Internet, and the police launch an appeal for witnesses from those who have been victims of the Foundation.
Now a dancer, notably on Drucker's sets in the 1990s, Cléo realises that a past that won't go away has come back for her, and that it's time to face up to her double burden of victim and perpetrator.
This book is a huge slap in the face.
I was very scared before I started it, given the subject (and the surprisingly pedantic back cover, which was very far removed from the book), but the author doesn't need to describe everything for us to understand what happened to Cleo and the others.
There is no voyeurism. We don't focus on the horror or the culprits. It's Cléo who interests us. Her strength, her weakness, her shame and her guilt. The lives she touched, Betty, Claude, Lara, Yonasz...
It's about me too, family silence, social struggles and racism, but also sisterhood, love and forgiveness.
