Les premières phrases

«  Laurie Garvey hadn’t been raised to believe in the Rapture. She hadn’t been raised to believe in much of anything, except the foolishness of belief itself.

We’re agnostics, she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends. We don’t know if there’s a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don’t.

The first time she’d heard about the Rapture, she was a freshman in college, taking a class called Intro to World Religions. The phenomenon the professor described seemed like a joke to her, hordes of Christians floating out of their clothes, rising up through the roofs of their houses and cars to meet Jesus in the sky, everyone else standing around with their mouths hanging open, wondering where all the good people had gone. »

Circonstances de lecture

Après avoir vu la saison 1 de la série TV inspirée du livre de Tom Perrotta, j’avais très envie d’en apprendre un peu plus sur cette histoire énigmatique.

Impressions

Tout commence lorsque 2 % de la population mondiale disparaît du jour au lendemain. Le temps de tourner la tête et ils se sont évanouis, purement et simplement, sans laisser la moindre trace. Comment réagir à un événement aussi inconcevable ? Comment redonner un sens à sa vie ? Les habitants de Mapleton essaient de reprendre le cours de leur vie, malgré tout. Mais tous ne veulent pas oublier… A l’instar d’une secte inquiétante, dont les membres doivent s’habiller uniquement de blanc, ne plus parler, fumer sans arrêt, tout en suivant certains habitants de Mapleton.

J’ai aimé ce livre, dont la série est plutôt fidèle. L’ambiance est certes assez glauque, mais le thème vraiment intéressant. En revanche, j’espère vivement que Tom Perrotta a prévu une suite. Car, malheureusement, les questions que je me posais après avoir regardé la série TV sont majoritairement restées sans réponse. Dommage… Alors, à quand un tome deux ?

Un passage parmi d’autres

 You started seing them around town the following autumn, people in white clothing, traveling in same-sex pairs, always smoking. Laurie recognized a few of them – Barbara Santangelo, whose son was in her daughter’s class; Marty Powers, who used to play softball with her husband, and whose wife had been taken in the Rapture, or whatever it was. Mostly they ignored you, but sometimes they followed you around as it they were private detectives hired to keep track of your movements. If you said hello, they just gave you a blank look, but if you asked a more substantive question, they handed over a business card printed on one side with the following message:

WE ARE MEMBERS OF THE GUILTY REMNANT. WE HAVE TAKEN A VOW OF SILENCE. WE STAND BEFORE YOU AS LIVING REMINDERS OF GOD’S AWESOME POWER. HIS JUDGEMENT IS UPON US.

Tom Perrotta – The Leftovers – 2011 (Fourth Estate)