Leila Slimani : "Chanson douce" : la permanente recherche de la maternité dans un contexte social paradoxal

Abstract EN

Leïla Slimani, is a journalist and author of several Franco-Moroccan books, born in 1981 in Meknes, Morocco.

She is a young Moroccan woman, a student at the French high school in Rabat.

Graduated from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.

In 2014, she published her first novel at Gallimard, "in the barley garden " and the work was nominated for the Flora prize 2014.

Her second novel, the one that concerns us more closely, "Soft song", won the Goncourt Prize 2016, as well as the Grand Prize of readers in 2017.

It was also adapted for cinema in 2019.

The plot takes place in a Parisian household.

Miriam, a lawyer, of foreign origin, left her business to take care of her two children in the first years of their existence, while her husband works in the recording industry.

Miriam suffocates between the four walls of her apartment, and thinks of regaining her profession as a lawyer.

The household will then interview any nannies to take care of their children.

He came across Louise, in her forties, widowed, courteous, attentive.

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Very quickly, a climate of reciprocal habituation took place.

The couple can no longer do without the services of this saving nanny, a good cook and loving children.

Louise, for her part, becomes more and more embedded in this replacement family, which makes her forget her lonely and obscure life in a cramped suburban dwelling.

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But this interdependence will die out in tragedy.

Leila Slimani delivers an exemplary picture of the strong relationships in our society: the household, the family, the children, the employees.

But her approach consists mainly in the presentation of the paradoxical figures of parents, but above all of motherhood which can take on several facets at the dawn of today's France.