Kirjahaku

Death At Half-Mast is the first novel by Denis Emorine. For him, this novel is a watermark of his work. He presents his favorite themes, especially love and death, which are brushing against each other, mingling, confronting each other until the end. First and foremost, this book is an hymn to passion in any form and fidelity because the main character, writer Dominique Valarcher, belongs to one woman only, Laetitia. As long as he lives with this superior, intelligent and attractive woman, death is suspended, set back, even if, for him, death is an obsession he can't forget. Dominique is divided, sometimes excited and at other times, extremely sensitive. For him, important affective relations are with women because with them he feels like a privileged person. With each favorite lady friend, Dominique tries to find the sister he never had. The young women who like him consider him as a symbolic father. Of course, it's not quite safe. Valarcher is from Russian ancestry on his grandmother's side and Laetita often tells him: "Your Russian side frightens me." Those contradictions are increasing his fragility and give him a particular inspiration. Meeting Nora Nemeth, a student who is working on a master's thesis about his work, is a challenge for him. Could he overcome his weak character and especially his cowardice?

Denis Emorine's short-stories reflect the misunderstanding that separates human beings, the gap between the words and their meaning. For the author, the language, far from facilitating the exchanges among us, makes all communication almost impossible. Man is trapped by his feelings whatever these feelings may be. In this way an individual is thus doomed to deceive others and to deceive oneself and manages to do it all in good faith.Denis Emorine's characters are often overwhelmed by a situation they are unable to control or they are victims of fatality as it happens in a Greek tragedy. According to the Russian literary critic Dimitri Zadkine, it is "the romantics condemned to failure who make of their existence a tragedy, the artists lost in a dreamlike dimension, where their hypersensitivity prevents them from taking flight. They are always on the borders of madness and death.