"La Vraie vie"

ADELINE DIEUDONNÉ "LA VRAIE VIE"

Honestly, the term of the genre that characterizes this novel is not easy for me. On the one hand, the book is embedded in the realities of reality and seems to be moral, but at the same time you can not ignore the whole of its climate, which surrounds magic and some extraordinary character, which gives it the characteristics of a fantastic novel. Nevertheless, I would not call it a fantastic novel, because the "magic" that I am talking about is not intrusive and dominant - we do not have dragons, flying fairies, elves and a completely different reality. What's more, because we are dealing with a first-person narrative, and our narrator is a little girl endowed with unusual imagination, it is difficult to estimate how presented the world corresponds to real events around her, and how much is the product of her lush fantasy. When I was wondering how to call such a kind of novel, I remembered that I had read about magical reality once. Refreshing myself what magical realism stands out, I am willing to risk and say that perhaps this word reflects the genre with which we are dealing. It also speaks for the fact that Dieudonné is a Belgian, and Belgian literature is a large fantasy heritage, dividing into various interesting subgenres.

I am certainly inclined to call La vraie vie an initiation novel. The heroine undergoes a huge change. The reader begins the novel from the relationship of a small, carefree girl, and ends up reading with a picture of a young, but still much more mature girl. It is worth noting that our narrator is mature from the first pages, but it gets stronger with each side.