Sandrine Collette

The apocalypse as seen almost entirely through the eyes of one family living on a small island. It is relentlessly grim, a series of greater and lesser tragedies with one unbearable, horrifying decision at its heart. It covers a very short span of time in agonizing detail, and creates a verisimilitude that causes real discomfort and anxiety. There is real heroism here as well, and by real I mean spur-of-the-moment, followed by real consequences and grief. Like many books of this genre, the ending is abrupt, and upbeat compared to the rest of the book. It just wouldn't let go of me, and that's really something.… (more)

Dystopia, Post-apocalyptic call it what you will, but novels of this kind must portray a world that the reader can understand, or even better to feel, to be successful. Although I struggled to believe in the world before the cataclysmic event, that changed everything in Sandrine Collets book, I had no problem with the world that she created afterwards. In addition her focus on a particular isolated families' situation had an intensity rarely found in novels of this type.

We first meet Corentin hanging from his mothers stomach and when he is finally born he is an unwanted child. He is dumped onto his grandmother who lives in a small hamlet surrounded by forests. She raises him in the ways of the forests and when he is old enough he moves on to a large town where he goes to college. During the time of his upbringing the world is suffering from climate change; getting hotter. He becomes a member of a loose society of students who make a home for themselves underground to avoid the heated climate. This saves them the fire that destroys the planet and which lasts for days. Only those students who wait patiently for the fire above them to burn itself out survive and when they finally emerge they separate immediately to search for their families. Corentin goes back to the forests to find his grandmother and her latest charge - the young woman Mathilde. They had been working in their cave under the house and had survived. Everything on the surface of the planet had been burnt in the inferno, including all the people. The dust from the ashes had obscured the sun and the world had plunged into a near permanent winter. Nothing would grow.

Corentin moves in with the two women and explores the local village in search of food and they start to wait out the catastrophe. However two years on and nothing has changed, they live in a grey/blackened world only alleviated by the snowfall. Mathilde has no love or feelings for Corentin, but they drift together with the need to create something: a family, Mathilde gets pregnant and then suffers horribly in bringing twins into the world. Grandmother Augustine dies after this horrendous confinement, but Mathilde recovers and the two young people are left to make their way in the new world.

Sandrine Collett tells her story in splashes of short prose. It is all about survival in an inhospitable world. Corentine and Mathilde's family get bigger, until Mathilde cries enough, there will be no more children. Her descriptions of the burnt forest and the humans anxious search for signs of new life, new growth; form the backbone to this novel. Collet's concentration on the nucleus of the family and its loveless central relationship provides an atmosphere of isolation and seclusion. The will to survive struggles to break through the enforced claustrophobia. A cold, depressing read, it may be, but with an undeniable atmosphere all of its own. I was pleased to look up from my reading to see the greenery outside my window. It felt good to keep ensuring myself that the planet had not burned. The novel won the 2020 Grand Prix RTL-Lire in France and I was convinced and so 4.5 stars… (more)

A quote on the cover states as follows:

"A combination of a South American Western and a noir, Nothing But Dust has airs of Faulknerian tragedy in full Argentinian heat. A vicious circle of cruelty and redemption, written with complete austerity."

I haven't read any Faulkner but I have read Marguerite Duras and this book is the crushing and brutal tone of the family in [The Lover], but instead of Indochina we are on the Patagonian plains in Argentina. Rafael is the youngest of four sons, born right after the disapperance of the father, and is thus subsequently terrorized by the oldest twin brothers as if he were at fault. He finds no safety in the skirts of the mother as she is even more cruel, reigning over her family as harsh as the Patagonia environment reigns over her ranch. The beauty of the book comes from the beauty of the landscapes and the movement of the horses over it as they herd in the sheep for shearing. The rest is terrorizing, cold, cruel, and brutal, and even as Rafael tries to bring home hope, it leads to a brutal climax as we are reminded that in Patagonia our time here is temporary and once we leave there will be nothing but dust.

A stunning little gem translated from the original French. And the translation is fantastic. Much recommended.

Interestingly enough this book was winner of the Landerneau Prize for crime fiction but I'm not understanding why it won under this category. Either the crime fiction genre has changed dramatically but I felt this is really just a very dark, noir, literary Western.… (more)