Once I finish reading Asli Erdogan’s newly-released Le silence même n’est plus à toi* (Even silence isn’t yours anymore), it will probably be on my bookshelf next to Varlam Chalamov**, Ryszard Kapuschinski and Hanna Krall***, and Phil Klay’s Redeployment ****too.

A motley crew? It would prove even motlier if I added other names, but I have lots of other things to do this afternoon- including renewing teaching basic French and Math to young children after the Christmas break.

So, a Russian, two Poles, a Turk and…an American returning from his tour of duty in Irak? (The first words in Redeployment, by the way, are: “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about it a lot.“)

Uh…common denominator? As the title says: Truth. Unvarnished. Most of us need a good amount of varnish on our truths – I have plenty of other books to take care of that end of things in my own life. More subtle, funny, ironic, wondrous. If it’s good, I like it.

But everybody needs shots of the unvarnished kind. If only to keep their own writing (and living) as honest as is sustainable at any given time.

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Now, what will it be this afternoon? Word games where  you fill in the blank with the right pronoun? Multiplication tables? A brief history of humanity in four easy-to-recall dates? Or a bit of drawing and story-telling maybe, to ease back into the choppy rapids of school learning.

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*Asli Erdogan, Le silence même n’est plus à toi, chroniques traduites tu turc par Julien Lapeyre de Cabanes, Actes Sud 2017

** Varlam Chalamov, Kolyma récits de la vie des camps, Actes et mémoires du peuple/François Maspero 1980

***Ryszard Kapuscinki & Hanna Krall La mer dans une goutte d’eau, reportages réunis et présentés par Margot Carlier, Les éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2016

****Phil Klay Redeployment, Canongate Books 2015