Chloé Delaume

Le cri du sablier

The Cry of the Hourglass

October 1, 2003
Novel
128 pages
100 × 170 mm
9782070426188
978-2-0704-2618-8
																Chloé Delaume, Le cri du sablier
																Chloé Delaume, Le cri du sablier

Chloé Delaume’s book is the story of a reminiscence. It goes back in time to shatter an oppressive past. Its virulence has the power of a cry. A true leitmotif of the novel, the metaphor of the hourglass spreads, branches out: it draws the central and traumatic figure of a “sedimentary” father and of a “child of silt”. Neither pathos nor complacency. But the attempt, as an adult, to answer the questioning of a child, an attempt made possible by a certain sweetness of irony. Everything passes through the prism of a singular language, overflowing with inventions. The style is excessive, sometimes terse, sometimes abysmal. The words jostle each other, become invasive, until they give an impression of fusion.

The author

Chloé Delaume was born in 1973. She has been writing in many forms and media since the late 1990s. She has written nearly thirty books as if they were experiments: novels, poetic fragments, plays, essays, self-fiction. She is fond of hybrid objects and the mixing of genres: a novel illustrated by a video game (Corpus Simsi), the hijacking of a board game (Certainement pas), fan fiction in which you are the hero (La nuit je suis Buffy Summers). But also diary of a home performance (J’habite dans la télévision), dystopia (Les sorcières de la République). If her first novel, Les mouflettes d’Atropos, was tinged with radical feminism, she later focused on the issue of sisterhood by publishing Mes bien chères sœurs and the collective work Sororité.
Winner of the Prix Décembre 2001 for Le cri du sablier, she was a resident at the Villa Médicis in 2010-2011 and won the Prix Médicis 2020 with Le cœur synthétique.

October 1, 2003
Novel
128 pages
100 × 170 mm
9782070426188
978-2-0704-2618-8