Used book – Ingrid Caven - Prix Goncourt 2000, Jean-Jacques Schuhl

1943. Christmas Eve on the North Sea coast: a four-year-old girl sings "Silent Night" for Adolf Hitler's soldiers. Half a century later, a renowned singer and film actress, she gives a brief recital at the end of an official reception in the Citadel of David in Jerusalem. Disabled and almost blind in her youth, she became the woman who, on stage, has "the sangfroid of a bullfighter, the concentration of a Buddhist monk, and the vital fantasy of a brothel entertainer." She is the central character of this contemporary novel, which features figures who have crossed her life: Yves Saint Laurent, R. W. Fassbinder, to whom she was married and who left a mysterious manuscript about her by his deathbed, and others. And also a certain Charles, a "Huguenot Jew," a dilettante fascinated by a flamboyant and suicidal young producer. From the "holy night" of childhood to the "sacred nights" of adulthood, this frenetic narrative, punctuated by dark humor, blends the tone of comic strips and fairy tales with the dry precision of information and documents, some of them unpublished. Horror is never far from magic. Neither is masquerade. Especially now, with the advent of a world without memory. Finally! "The situation is desperate but not serious." For now, a concert is unfolding: Music!