Les dix enfants que madame Ming n'a jamais eus.
Part VI in the Cycle de l'Invisible.
Out on 5th April 2012.
Madam Ming likes to talk about her ten children, who live scattered across China's vast land mass. Is she making it up, in the country of the only child? Has she circumvented the law? Has she gone quietly mad? Could it be that her offspring is a figment of her imagination?
Madam Ming's amazing secret echoes the secrets of China past and China present, enlightened by the timeless wisdom of Confucius. The Ten Children that Madam Ming Never Had is the sixth novella in the series Le Cycle de l'Invisible and follows Oscar and the Lady in Pink, Mr Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, and Noah's Child.
La femme au miroir.
Anne lives in Bruges at the time of the Renaissance, Hanna in turn-of-the-century imperial Vienna, Anny Lee in present-day Los Angeles. Three lives, three remarkable adventures, three women with extraordinary parallels, united by the sense of their own difference and by their desire to escape the image which the mirror of their day holds up to them. Everything puts them at odds with what their century, their environment and men have decided for them. Flemish Anne has mystic visions that lead her to the convent. Hanna is one of Sigmund Freud’s first patients and breaks with all the family and moral codes of her time. Anny, whose gifts portend a brilliant acting career, refuses to be cast in the Hollywood mould. All of them are insubordinate and rebellious, but which will fight her way to find truth and freedom?
Quand je pense que Beethoven est mort alors que tant de crétins vivent.
One day at an exhibition of masks, Beethoven returned to the life of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. The writer recalled that he had been passionate about him in his adolescence.
Why did Beethoven withdraw? Why does today’s man no longer experience the same emotions, the same romanticism and private storms, the same joy? Who has died? Beethoven or us? And who is the assassin?
Schmitt’s essay is followed by Kiki van Beethoven, the story of a radiant woman in her sixties whose life, and the life of her three friends, is changed by music. A fable about lost youth and buried secrets.