{"id":531680,"date":"2026-03-12T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=531680"},"modified":"2026-03-12T07:53:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T06:53:47","slug":"irene-frain-lor-de-la-nuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/literature\/irene-frain-lor-de-la-nuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Ir\u00e8ne Frain, all the gold of promise\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Night Gold (\u00abL\u2019Or de la nuit\u00bb)<\/em> is the story of the name that transmission takes on when it becomes destiny: affabulation. Ir\u00e8ne Frain plunges us into the heart of the 18th<\/sup> century, when a modest orientalist stumbled across anonymous Arab tales and decided to put them into the hands of readers. And to do so, he translated them. Except that translating is not the right word. He embroiders, comments, invents, ornaments. \u00abWithout scruples \u2013 he had forgotten what scruples were. The dreamer in him had silenced the scholar. And how powerful he was that evening!\u00bb <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | An unimportant book?<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

It was a huge success, with audiences clamoring for the sequel. But horror! He couldn't get his hands on the other tales. He questioned antique dealers and booksellers, and wrote to his contacts in the Middle East, but the second part of the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Outside, the rebels shouted: \u00abGalland, feignant, a sequel, quick, what are you waiting for, feignant, we're waiting for you...\u00bb Caught in the vice of words, Antoine Galland stalks an invisible prey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00abHe had long embraced Scheherazade's wisdom: what matters is the true, what matters is the false, only the beauty of the gesture of the man or woman who, in solitude, and under the threat of night, goes off to pick up a story hanging on the crescent moon, just before it sinks into the abyss of the starry sky.\u00bb\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Between Versailles and the Orient, the novelist of more than 60 books takes the reader in the footsteps of Antoine Galland, scholar-traveler, consul and member of the Acad\u00e9mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, but above all the first translator of the A Thousand and One Nights<\/em>. In ten large chapters, each composed of short stories, she dreams of herself as Scheherazade, orchestrating the rhythm, carefully distilling suspense and stretching the plot to the point of opening up parallel lives. But beyond the fascinating odyssey of a text, Night Gold (\u00abL\u2019Or de la nuit\u00bb)<\/em> is the story of a double betrayal: Galland's betrayal of words, and Ir\u00e8ne Frain's betrayal of the reader. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ir\u00e8ne Frain stalls history<\/strong> <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The promise was beautiful, tantalizing: to make this novel the mirror of the book it's about, by means of twists and turns, swarming doubts, masterful twists and infinite beginnings. To keep a hungry reader on the edge of his seat. But underneath the pretty rhetorical bodywork lies the engine of a moped. You can feel the intention, you can see the gesture, but it just doesn't work. After the first quarter of the story and the setting up of the plot, the narrative coughs, then bogs down laboriously. We get terribly bored and turn the pages faster and faster, reading diagonally to loosen the mud stuck to our fingers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n