Publisher's Synopsis
¿Qué vale una vida? ¿Se cumple su ciclo al morir? ¿Puede una vida común y casi anónima resonar hasta nuestros dìas, convertirse en el emblema de una época? En junio de 1957, durante la batalla de Argel, el matemático y militante comunista Maurice Audin fue apresado por el Ejército francés, acusado de colaborar con el movimiento de independencia argelino. Tenìa veinticinco años. Torturado hasta la muerte, su cuerpo nunca se encontró. En 2014 el Gobierno francés por fin reconoció que su desaparición, un caso que conmocionó a la sociedad francesa durante décadas, no habìa sido un misterio sin resolver, sino un asesinato de Estado. Este libro, a medio camino entre el documento y el ejercicio literario, no trata sobre esa muerte, sino que es la reconstrucción, a modo de inventario al más puro estilo perecquiano, del dìa a dìa de una vida prematuramente segada, una existencia que la autora indaga con la minuciosidad de un arqueólogo.
What is a life worth? Is your cycle completed when you die? Can a common and almost anonymous life resonate in this day, becoming the emblem of an era? In June 1957, during the Battle of Algiers, the mathematician and communist militant Maurice Audin was arrested by the French Army, accused of collaborating with the Algerian independence movement. He was 25 years old. Tortured to death, his body was never found. In 2014, the French government finally recognized that his disappearance, a case that shocked French society for decades, had not been an unsolved mystery, but rather a state murder. This book, halfway between the document and the literary exercise, does not deal with that death, but is the reconstruction, by way of an inventory in the purest Pereccan style, of the day-to-day life of a life that was prematurely cut off, an existence that the author investigates with the thoroughness of an archaeologist.
What is a life worth? Is your cycle completed when you die? Can a common and almost anonymous life resonate in this day, becoming the emblem of an era? In June 1957, during the Battle of Algiers, the mathematician and communist militant Maurice Audin was arrested by the French Army, accused of collaborating with the Algerian independence movement. He was 25 years old. Tortured to death, his body was never found. In 2014, the French government finally recognized that his disappearance, a case that shocked French society for decades, had not been an unsolved mystery, but rather a state murder. This book, halfway between the document and the literary exercise, does not deal with that death, but is the reconstruction, by way of an inventory in the purest Pereccan style, of the day-to-day life of a life that was prematurely cut off, an existence that the author investigates with the thoroughness of an archaeologist.
