Someone

Brooklyn during the 1930s. Marie is a funny-faced seven year old who sees the world which surrounds her through thick lens glassses with an acuity only the most sensitive individuals display. Her brother Gabe aspiring to the priesthood, the ladies in the neighbourhood, their secrets and sacrifices, the experience of falling in love for the first time, the road from childhood to old age... Marie reveals her life without adhering to any fixed chronology : the puzzle making up her existence is reorganised in a deliberately elliptical way under the reader's gaze. It is up to the reader of 'Someone' to fill in the blanks and moments of silence whose outlines and textures Mc Dermott traces affectionately. There is only one step between being nobody and becoming someone, a transition that Alice McDermott's talent allows us to make. Before our ryes, in 'the slow orangy hours of the afternoon', these ordinary characters become for the reader travelling companions whose every moment of joy and suffering becomes apparent to us. Each scene seems to have been appropriated from one of Hopper's paintings : stripped bare and exacting of absolute truth. Alice McDermott is one of those authors who possesses the rare gift of conveying something unlikely to her unforgettable antiheroine : grace. Stéphanie.