Michael Cunningham : By nightfall (Crépuscule)

Je n'ai pas lu Les heures durant l'été, mais un autre roman de Cunningham : By nightfall.
Ce roman se passe dans New-York, à l'époque contemporaine. Un couple d'une quarantaine d'années, Peter et Rebecca, à la vie professionnelle réussie, voir leur vie personnelle un peu chamboulée : leur fille s'éloigne d'eux, décide de mener une vie bien différente de la leur sans qu'ils ne sachent trop pourquoi ; et leur amour a laissé place à l'habitude. Arrive le jeune frère de Rebecca, surnommé Mizzy pour the Mistake (il a 20 ans de moins que ses soeurs), dont l'originalité et le mal-être va porter un coup qui peut être l'ultime à la vie de Peter et Rebecca.

L'histoire en elle-même ne m'a pas vraiment emballée : c'est une sorte de poncif que je verrais parfaitement joué par Bacri et Jaoui (et ce n'est pas le genre de films que j'aime). Mais j'ai été complètement séduite par le style : cet auteur a une plume magnifique !!!
Je vous mets une citation qui m'a emportée, même si elle est un peu longue :

Citation :

Peter waits for the light, crosses among a small congregation of those nighttime pedestrians of lower Broadway, the couples and quartets (they're always paired) who are neither old nor young, who are clearly prosperous, who are Out for the Night and seem to be having a good-enough time, having driven in, he supposes, from somewhere nearby, parked in a public garage, had dinner, and are now headed ... where? To retrieve their cars, to go home; Where else ? These are not people with inscrutable assignations. They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like te gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creature of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New-York, because they'd rather stay home [...], while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it's almost impossible to maintain a sens of hubris when you live here, you're too constantly confronted by the rampant otherness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you've got a house and lawn and a Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you'll get a second's more existence because the bomb won't be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you're not anybody's main target, you've removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor's son will break in and steal a few prescription bottles from your medicine cabinet.

Merci pour ton avis Akina!