The Illness Lesson | Clare Beams

Résumé : 

A mysterious flock of red birds has descended over Birch Hill. Recently reinvented, it is now home to an elite and progressive school designed to shape the minds of young women. But Eliza Bell – the most inscrutable and defiant of the students – has been overwhelmed by an inexplicable illness.

One by one, the other girls begin to experience the same peculiar symptoms: rashes, fits, headaches, verbal tics, night wanderings. Soon Caroline – the only woman teaching – begins to suffer too. She tries desperately to hide her symptoms but, with the birds behaving strangely and the girls’ condition worsening, the powers-that-be turn to a sinister physician with grave and dubious methods.

Caroline alone can speak on behalf of the students, but only if she summons the confidence to question everything she’s ever learnt. Does she have the strength to confront the all-male, all-knowing authorities of her world and protect the young women in her care?

Distinctive, haunting, irresistible, The Illness Lesson is an intensely vivid debut about women's minds and bodies, and the time-honoured tradition of doubting both.

Voici une traduction personnelle du résumé ci-dessus :

TRADUCTION A VENIR

Extrait : 

ASHWELL, MASSACHUSETTS, 1871

Wonders, wonders!

—MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 4)

The first of the birds Caroline mistook for her own mind’s work. When the streak of red crossed the kitchen windowpane, fast, disastrous-bright, she thought it was some bloody piece come loose inside herself.

Then her father appeared from the study and held the doorframe, leaning in. “Caroline! Did you see?”

They found it in the yard, real after all: high in their birch tree, pecking judiciously at the bark. The size of a dove, the shape of a crow, and a brazen crimson tip to tail feathers, the shade a cardinal might bloom to if dipped in wine. It had a crestless head, all sharp planes. As the Hoods watched, it took a choosy bird-step forward, then craned neck over back to root around in its wing.

“No question at all,” Samuel Hood said. His hand on Caroline’s arm felt slight. This shock had dislodged his usual serenity, and in his face she saw old age, the way his features would fold in on themselves. To brace them both she gripped his fingers. “Trilling hearts. Who’d have believed?”

“A trilling heart,” Caroline said.

She had just one hazy red-tinged memory of the trilling hearts’ only prior appearance in Ashwell, twenty-five years earlier. Standing barefoot in the grass of the front garden, four years old and afraid to go down the path because of the bird that stood guard there, chopping up a worm with its brutal beak. Snip, snip, snip, worm bits on the gravel. On the steps behind her, sewing in the sun, her mother.

“What can this mean?” her father asked.

“That there’s a red bird in our tree.”

Samuel put a hand to his shirtfront. When he was a boy, his appendix had almost burst before the surgeon managed to remove it, and in moments of great excitement a heat-and-pain phantom seemed to revisit him. Sometimes Caroline found him with his fingers pressed there while he wrote and knew he was imagining readers, roomfuls of them, schools of hands turning reams of his pages.

“There is some significance,” he said.

Voici une traduction personnelle de l'extrait ci-dessus :

TRADUCTION A VENIR

Extrait du chapitre 1 : Birds, again

Mon avis : 

AVIS A VENIR

Ma note :

17/20

Infos complémentaires :

Genre : Historique, Philosophique

Editions : Doubleday
Date de parution : 2020

Nombre de pages : 288