A great literary effort of choral protagonism, with six characters that we will follow over four days, spread over the four seasons of the year from the summer, in the years 2015-2016. Here is the mammoth work of Céline Curiol (Lyon, 1975), correspondent in New York for French media for more than ten years, where she was also employed at the UN, and whom we have known since she published her first novel, Voices in the Labyrinth , which had a Spanish edition in 2006. However, his subsequent books had not yet been translated, both the fiction ones and another in which he ventures into the experience of having suffered from depression.
This time, with The Laws of Ascension, he delivers a grand narrative challenge, opening with a wonderful quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “Could a greater miracle happen to us than, for an instant, to see through the eyes of another? In fact, it is the reader who will be able to put himself in the shoes of, to begin with, a forty-year-old journalist, without children and with a recently ended relationship, who works for a news website for a television channel ( Orna) , and that she is always concerned about the fact that in her field the audience is prior to the quality of information.
Likewise, we have her sister, a university professor located in Dubai and an expert in environmental issues (Selène) who can only consider the country to which she has had to move to be an artificial world, marked by the lack of freedom that prevails there. and how foreign workers are exploited; also, to a Parisian psychiatrist who has among his patients Orna (Dr. Pavel), who has just divorced and is the father of a girl who is in high school; a sixty-year-old Senegalese (Modé) who works for an association, writes poetry and who will soon find himself doomed to a frightening retirement; a somewhat rebellious twenty-year-old (Hope) who works for an Amazon-type company near Orleans after dropping out of school; and Mehdi, the son of an employee of Pavel who is tending towards Islamist radicalism.
The actions and thoughts of all of them will lead us to position ourselves against the various dilemmas that will arise. The first of these arises at the beginning, when Orna arrives at her house after work and finds an injured man at the foot of his building, a Tunisian migrant, Macef, and wonders if and how he should help him. Everything will happen in the novel in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, in the Belleville neighborhood –its inhabitants are mentioned in the final thank you note–, with references to the terrorist attack on the Bataclan theater. Their lives will intersect, of course, something that Curisol achieves with remarkable skill, although some readers may be overwhelmed by a story of such dimension and due to the prolixity of such intertwining of characters, which is taking place, for example, when Orna goes to the Modé association to try to locate the poor man he had bumped into.
However, many others will be dazzled by how the French author is able to include in her story a great vivacity and variety of human characters and narrative points of view, to end up talking about a thousand important issues for today and forever. Among them are our economic and capitalist system, climate change, immigrants, job insecurity, life as a couple and the sacrifices that this can entail, or the responsibilities that we have to assume as citizens, rocked between an individualistic instinct and the elements of solidarity that form us as a civilization. In the end, what kind of ascension will the characters experience? It would be said that it has to do with finding oneself.
