“The Empty House” by Laurent Mauvignier: when the walls speak
Published on Reading time: 2 min
In his novel The Empty House, Laurent Mauvignier explores the silences of a place marked by absence, where each room seems to hold the secret of a buried story. Sylvie Goryl / Sylvie Goryl / VOZ'Image
In the midst of the literary season, Laurent Mauvignier has written a masterful novel, over 700 pages long, about his family. Five generations follow one another to describe a 20th century shaken by wars.
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I subscribeTransforming an empty house into a monument. This is the challenge met by Laurent Mauvignier, who uses fragile traces of the past to write a moving novel. Far from static appearances, the inherited house is inhabited by ghosts whose secrets the writer will gather to better tell the family story. Will he have all the answers? Why was this photo cut out, who is the erased character? Where has the Legion of Honor medal gone? It takes five generations to grasp the successive upheavals of this family settled in La Bassée, an imaginary village in Touraine, whose house—the pride of their ancestors—ends up abandoned.
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