Our book selection this week: "The Ministry of Fear," "Where I No Longer Have a Foothold," "Boualem Sansal Faces the Test of Reality," "A New Name"...

THE MORNING LIST

This week, "Le Monde des livres" recommends reading a great novel by Graham Greene, vigorously dusted off by a new translation by Claro; the account given by the Argentinian Belen Lopez Peiro of the preparation for the trial of her rapist; a literary essay on the work of Boualem Sansal, which recalls, in addition to the talent of the Franco-Algerian writer, that he has been languishing for almost six months in a jail in Algiers; a story by Tharcisse Sinziun, a Tutsi resistance fighter against the genocidaires, in 1994; and finally a hypnotic novel by the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner for literature, Jon Fosse .

NOVEL. “The Ministry of Fear,” by Graham Greene

Recruited in 1941 by his younger sister Elizabeth, Graham Greene (1904-1991) became an agent for MI6, where he was assigned the Freetown branch in the British colony of Sierra Leone. It was in December 1941, aboard the cargo ship taking him there, that he began The Ministry of Fear , a "divertissement" completed in Africa. The fruit of the striking experience of the Blitz, lived in April 1941, the novel saturates all the codes of the spy story to transform into a dreamlike journey with dizzying about-faces, a harassing carnival of masks lit by warning flares.

Greene draws us into the murderous and hallucinatory wanderings of Arthur Rowe, who, freshly released from the asylum where he was interned for the "charitable" murder of his sick wife, wins an opulent cake at a funfair. But the cake is a fake —it's a real-fake cake—and from then on, he continues to suffer from the pastry business. Caught in the merciless spiral of a spy case, he finds himself confronted by the machinations of a motley crew of Nazi sympathizers in search of a microfilm. We see him change identities and become amnesiac, move from an air-raid shelter to a psychiatric clinic, cross paths with a spiritualist circle or men's tailors, collaborate with the Yard, find love, and escape death.

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