´La Femme au Colt 45´ by Marie Redonnet

´´Pour être forte, je dois vivre comme si je n´aimais personne. Personne!´

In a couple of his correspondences to literary friends and acknowledgements, Chekhov mentions how every element added in a story should be necessary, otherwise the irrelevant details need to be removed. This applies as well to a gun who, obviously in this line of thinking, should not only be there as an inanimate object, but be an active part of the story.

In La Femme au Colt 45 - The Woman with a Colt 45 - the character of Marie Redonnet´s book, a women escaping the dictatorship of Azirie, reinventing herself in the neighbouring La Santarie, is accompanied by her gun. A gun which before being sold, is saving her, keeping her company and equally playing a role in her new network of friends. 

Once, she used to be the star of Le Théâtre Magique - The Magic Theatre. Her husband, Zuka, was a public intellectual until he become critical against the government of gen. Rafi. Her son ended up fighting in a guerilla movement. She gathered all her belongings and escaped out of the country on a boat. At 50, the reinvented Lora Sanders is starting a new life, where survival is what it matters. Love and feelings and family are things of the past, not to be reiterated.

With a theatrical touch - La Femme was also played on the stage - the relatively short book - is a meeting of many possible categorisations, hopefully escaping all of them for the overall sake of the literary emancipation of all possible narrow mindsets. Like Lora, the text is dancing freely among words of literary sophistication, inadequate enough to fully describe the prose: social story, immigration story, adventurous account, women literature. Sometimes, we forget the pleasure of just getting lost in a text, simply by putting our simplicity- and clarity-addicted mind on hold.

Rating: 4.5 stars