“I am Pompeii”: mother in distress
“I am Pompeii”, fragmentary novel by Ava Rose Riverin, published this fall, reveals the very fine pen of this writer for more than 15 years.
Ava Rose Riverin's first novel, Je suis Pompéi, published this fall by Éditions Château d'encre, seduced from the first lines by the beauty of her writing.
Ava Rose Riverin, who has been a writer for 15 years, skilfully plays with the craft of the fragmentary narrative, oscillating from one chapter to another between key moments in the love-starved life of Alice, a woman in existence tragic.
Her years of prostitution pass, her meeting with the lackluster man who will become her husband— whom she never loved, and neither did he —, their first date (she was looking for a father, he, an immaculate looking couple), the birth of their son…
I am Pompeii begins in 1993 with the portrait of Alice's calamitous childhood, dominated by the violence that her father inflicts on her and her mother. We are then transported to 2001, during the trial against her ex-husband, an ignoble being who wants to annihilate her (as he had done with his ex-wife) by taking their child away from her.
After having stripped me of my life, of my history, they tear away fractions of my dignity, they torpedo my motherhood.
Passage of I am Pompeii
These fragments of life are interspersed with chapters narrated by characters gravitating near or far around the protagonist. Some are treacherous (her husband in mind), others benevolent, and all of them shed light on Alice's life. the way the characters express themselves, transmits with emotion the inner torments of a mother deprived of her reason for being by a man greedy for power over women.
