A Suburban Park at the Intersection of Human Destinies Affected by a Pandemic in Sylvie Germain’s Novel Brèves de solitude
| Title in English | A Suburban Park at the Intersection of Human Destinies Affected by a Pandemic in Sylvie Germain’s Novel Breves de solitude |
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The aim of this chapter is to analyze how a suburban peripheral area, transformed into a center of encounter due to the Covid-19 pandemic, affects the characters who inhabit it. The chapter contains an analysis of the role of space in one of Sylvie Germain’s latest novels, Breves de solitude [Short Stories of Solitude] (2021), from a spatio-temporal, transgressive and multifocal perspective. Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical approach to space in a literary text includes multifocalization in its methodology, which is presented as a tension arising from the encounter of different points of view in the same place. These multiple perceptions of the same place, which takes on different functions at a time when habitual activities are restricted, are also presented in this novel. The various characters frequent this place, pondering their situation and guessing that of others. They cross paths, meet or avoid others for various reasons, fearing each other, whilst at the same time lacking close human contact in their private lives. The park assumes this social function as a place for rather shy encounters, yet with a glimmering hope of human closeness which contrasts profoundly with their loneliness. |