In his first novel published in August by Liana Levi editions, Agnès Jesupret recounts a family saga which leads a Sicilian family in Tunisia, at the very beginning of the twentieth century.
In 192 pages of a remarkable density, Agnès Jesupret undertook to tell a family story which began in 1908 with the arrival in Tunisia of a Sicilian family.
Dedicating his book to “all the migrants in the world, to those who listen to them and welcome them”, the author brings back the soft and bitter hours of many families including that emblematic which radiates around the Nonna Agostina Rubino.
Born themselves in Grombalia, in Cape Bon Tunisien, the narrator’s parents are at the heart of a story that is both deeply personal and universal, as suggested by Manou Pauwels’s words, placed in the work: “A life is not a succession of facts in the raw state”.
According to the presentation of the publisher, “the black bones” obeys the following frame: “To the twilight of his life, Clara ignorant tells with nostalgia the story of his Sicilian grandparents who arrived in Tunisia to flee misery. On this land that everyone appropriated – French colonists, Italian migrants, German occupants – his family will experience prosperity and then forfeiture.
And from this land will be exhumed’s bones of his father who became black, proof of poisoning. Revenge, betrayal or curse? The narrator who listens to Clara tries to disentangle the sons of her memory, even if it means exhuming the secrets. ”
In this first bewitching and documented novel, Agnès Jesupret ransals the pieces of a fate fractured by the vagaries of history and manages to restore a backdrop that interests Tunisia, Sicily and the Mediterranean as well as all migrants and life stories of which they could be the authors and narrators.
Agnès Jesupret lives in Marseille. For several years she has put her pen at the service of the memories of others and herself defines herself as an “anonymous biographer for people who are just as much”.
“The black bones” is the first novel by Jesupret Agné. It will be presented today, Wednesday, December 11, 2024, on Radio Tunis International Channel on Radio.
