Soft song E-Book

Florence Dabadie

• Herausgeber: BrightSummaries.com
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 32

Beschreibung

What should we learn from Soft song, this chilling novel based on a true story? Find everything you need to know about this work in a complete and detailed analysis. You will find in this file: - A complete summary - A presentation of the main characters such as Louise, Myriam and Paul - An analysis of the specificities of the work: chronicle of a drama announced, a look at the contemporary world, a cold and distanced writing A reference analysis to quickly understand the meaning of the work.

Leseprobe

LEÏLA SLIMANI

FRENCH-MOROCCAN JOURNALIST AND NOVELIST

•Born in 1981 in Rabat (Morocco)

•Some of his works:

°In the Ogre's Garden (2014), novel

°Sex and Lies (2017), essay

Leïla Slimani comes from a French-speaking Moroccan family and belongs to an affluent background. Her father is a senior Moroccan civil servant who studied in France. Her mother, a French-Moroccan, is a doctor. With her baccalaureate obtained at the French Lycée in Rabat, she went to Paris and the Lycée Fénelon to begin a literary preparatory class. After graduating from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and trying her hand at acting, she trained as a journalist at L'Express before being hired at the newspaper Jeune Afrique in 2008. In 2012, she decided to devote herself to literary writing. In 2014, she published her first novel, Dans le jardin de l'ogre (In the Garden of the Ogre), which received critical acclaim. Her second novel, Chanson douce, won the Goncourt Prize in 2016. A year later, Leïla SLimani published an essay, Sexe et mensonge, devoted to “sexual misery in the Maghreb”. She says she is influenced by Chekhov, who “loves his characters” and “never judges them”, as well as by Stefan Zweig and Milan Kundera.

SOFT SONG

A NOVEL BASED ON A NEWS STORY

•Genre: novel

•Reference edition: SLIMANI L., Chanson douce, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 2016, 227 p.

•1st edition: 2016

•Themes: crime, family, education, addiction, contemporary society, professional success, money, social classes

Mila and Adam, the children of Myriam and Paul Massé, are found brutally murdered. The person responsible for this atrocious crime is Louise, their nanny, who was hired by the Parisian couple when Myriam decided to go back to work as a lawyer. The narrator goes back in time, according to the principle of analepsis, to try to understand the reasons for this tragedy. At first, everything suggests that Louise is the ideal nanny, perfectly assisting Myriam and Paul at home. But as time goes by, Louise's presence becomes unnaturally intrusive, as if she wanted to become a full member of the family. Her dependence grows and becomes increasingly unbearable. With a sharp and incisive style, taking the form of terse and raw statements, and with a lively rhythm marked by short chapters, Leïla Slimani tackles contemporary issues such as the family, the education of children, professional success, and class prejudices. It also reflects on the relationships of dependence and power between individuals. For this novel, the author was inspired by a news item that occurred in the United States on 25 October 2012: a mother of three children finds two of her children stabbed to death in her Upper West Side flat. The perpetrator is their nanny: she slit her own throat but did not die.

SUMMARY

When Myriam Massé returned from work early, she found her two children stabbed. Adam is dead on the spot, Mila succumbs to her wounds on the way to the hospital. The criminal is their nanny. Still at the scene, she tried to commit suicide but failed. She is in a coma.