DISAPPEARANCE – She said she entered literature with The Gospels of Crime, published in 1992. For all of her incandescent work, the French author of Vietnamese origin received the Prince Pierre of Monaco prize in 2009.
The latest book by Linda Lê, who died Monday at the age of 58 from a long illness, was published three months ago, in February. Of no one I was the contemporary recounted the meeting in 1923 of two men who had in common only to be rebellious, Ho Chi Minh and the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam, who died in deportation to Kolyma: “Ho Chi Minh had his mausoleum, Mandelstam the honors of a mass grave”. The sentence which gives its title to the book, borrowed from Mandelstam, Linda Lê could have taken it up on her own, she who wrote and lived in a “sovereign solitude”.
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Born in 1963 in Dalat in Vietnam, Linda Lê then lived in Saigon. His father, an engineer of modest origin, worked for an American firm. His mother from a good family was Francophile and Francophone. Linda was educated at the Couvent des Oiseaux, then at the French high school where she discovered Balzac and Hugo. With her father she spoke Vietnamese, with her mother French. An intimate war echoed in her the war that was tearing Vietnam apart. A crack, a discordance that we will find in his work, the one that separated his parents. In 1977, when her father had lost his job, Mrs. Lê embarked Linda and her sisters for France, heading for Le Havre. Linda Lê will never see her father with whom she corresponded and who encouraged her to write. After her death in 1995, she will write three novels The Three Fates, Voice, Dead Letterhaunted by this beloved and abandoned father.
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After her baccalaureate, Linda Lê was admitted to Hypokhâgne then to Khâgne at Henri IV. She will live for a long time near the Sainte-Geneviève library, the second home of this great reader. Eternal exile, she was wary of roots (but also of multiculturalism): books were her homeland. She said that certain authors at periods of her life when her reason was wavering, had saved her from her abyss, Cioran or Thomas Bernhard in particular, whose darkness revived her.
Duality, inner war and bewitchment
Among her favorite writers, all men and women who had seceded, there was Marina Tsvetaeva to whom she dedicated a book. Tsvetaeva from whom Linda Lê quoted this sentence: “I am not made for life (…) I am flayed, while you all wear armor.” And like another of her favorite poets, Emily Dickinson, she might have said, « Alone I cannot be/because multitudes visit me.
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The tone of his novels has been established over the years, more imprecatory and violent at the beginning, more calm and powerful but no less troubled, incandescent, twilight, thereafter. But the same haunting themes run throughout his work: duality, inner war, bewitchment, the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. “I like the incandescence of words, that books are fires”she said, specifying that she was writing in a « combustion state » but with great clarity. In 2019, she received the Prince Pierre of Monaco prize for all of her work. Indeed, Linda Lê, novelist and essayist, leaves behind a work.
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