Yes replied in a blast the French writer

IN the footsteps of the REINDEER of Mariusz Wilk. Translation Robert Bourgeois, black and white, 216 pages, 19 euros.

Robert Dessaix ARABESQUES. Translation Marie - Pierre Bay, Mercury's France, 279 pages, 23,80 euros.

THE high PLATEAUS of Lieve Joris. Translation Mary Hooghe, Actes Sud, 135 pages, 15 euros.

Three "astonishing travellers" invite us to explore the world, beautifully from the Arctic circle to Africa.

Mariusz Wilk is a travelling writer. A true. As Bruce Chatwin, the road is his goal, his life and his soul. How to challenge so short time. The back also. With "in the footsteps of the reindeer", it takes us in the footsteps of our distant ancestors hunters, the Saami, alias the Sami in the Russian peninsula of Kola. This people remains a mystery: is not really its origins (Asian, European), he speaks many dialects, and today (on) lives, exploded between various countries of the North, beyond the Polar circle.

"In the footsteps of the reindeer" is not a linear narrative. Mariusz Wilk we walk zigzag in space and time, distilling it and of historical and ethnographic information, paints the portrait of people whether or not it meets Sami. His descriptions, startling, often poetic, never cradle us of illusions. Its Kola Saami are passed under the Soviet steamroller, after Christianity. The Russian Sami no longer have much to do with their ancestors who lived in the footsteps of reindeer, their blood brothers. The city saami Lovoziero, point of departure of the quest for Wilk, is a cité-dortoir, where sinister HLM have replaced the "towers" and other "kouvaska" of nomads. However, the writer detects the spark of the past: a spiritual memory that connects the Saami to an Eden from the bottom of the ages. Wilk is a fundamentalist eco nor an illuminated in evil of shamanic trance. What it seeks to give us, it is a kind of Vertigo "humanist": the desire to reconnect with a very old world where the man was not trying to dominate nature, but to live with.

In the footsteps of Gide

Grand South Grand North, there is only a plane ticket. Mariusz Wilk, which in good Polish macho is visibly annoyed by the "gay", be probably not in the search for Robert Dessaix: follow André Gide in his "Arabesques". Indeed, the Australian writer follows a little everywhere: in Algiers, Biskra, Sousse, Tunis... but also in Normandy and in the South of the France. "Dear, you want the little musician", asked one day Oscar Wilde Gide in the Kasbah of Algiers. "Yes," replied in a blast the French writer. And that acquiescence is like a switch it will inspire all the wanderings of Gide, its most beautiful pages also. Dessaix identifies with Gide in his homosexual tendencies, but her story goes beyond. The Australian recounts in parallel and attempts to define what it attracts in the Arab countries, why such as Gide he returned constantly get lost in the meanders of the kasbahs in chiaroscuro perhaps "to remember the forgotten". "Arabesque" is a fine example of autofiction in movement and in Cinemascope.

Burning and dazzling story

As a piece of the basis or under the Sun, "Les Hauts Plateaux" of Lieve Joris is a story burning and dazzling that of a return to Africa, in areas lost to the Eastern Congo. More than fifty years, the Belgian travelling writer, who has much backpacked in these regions (tropism "inherited" a missionary uncle), passes through these unsung Highlands on foot to reach the town of Uvira on Lake Tanganyika. Five weeks of walking with an attendant selected by colonel who control the area, different carriers at each stage, longer and less stops in villages fascinated by the arrival of a "white".

Lieve Loris does not words pay. His story is concise, sharp. Everything is there landscapes and men, poverty, the joy and sadness, more or less contained violence of the military. The writer, in the harsh life of the Highlands, this new "beat the ardent heart of the Congo." "The Congolese sought contact, to stay alive, especially not to miss a single opportunity. Everything is said in these words moved the story of a love lucid and around for a country, a continent.