Member-only story
Aventure en Californie
PRÉSENTATION COMPLÈTE + PROLOGUE
https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/black-widow-lover-f42e009c52b5
DISCUSSION
https://www.academia.edu/s/2cece8d626
This novel was very long in its process of getting up into some kind of life. It is impossible to enter the story if you do not set your mind on France a little bit in the background in 1982, represented here by a Jewish woman, Rachel Duthoit from Croix who is the daughter of a couple of Auschwitz survivors, the father Abel Duthoit telling his daughter how the victim of some torture can easily become in a different situation the torturer of someone who has become the prey, his or her prey, in the new situation. We can always find someone smaller than us and find pleasure in hassling them. There is always a torturer in every single human being.
This young woman goes to the USA for a full year of teaching at the University of California at Davis. The novel is the story of her voyage there and of one particular young Black man, Tony Hughes, she meets along the way. The situation becomes erotic very fast for Rachel Duthoit, but she finds in Tony Hughes both the man she desires and the man she cannot have or take. Racial bias? Maybe. Cultural bias? Maybe. A deeply frustrating and frustrated experience on both sides that leads to a real drama of impossible communication and exchange.
You will wonder from beginning to end whether Rachel Duthoit had the intention to bring back some real personal transformation from the USA, or whether she was going there to enjoy the change but to keep herself protected against any real transformational experience as if her personality was some kind of a ghetto to be kept protected and pristine.
Did she become the torturer of Tony Hughes, at least by refusing to yield to his desire, by rejecting him?
But why on earth did she reject him? That’s your task to find out because as for me, I cannot really reach any clear-cut conclusion.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU.
Olliergues, France, February 18, 2022
