Taba-Taba

At the beginning of the sixties of the last century, in the Loire estuary, in an old lazaret converted into a psychiatric hospital, a boy observes a madman who, sitting on some steps and accompanying himself with a slow rocking of his body, chants: "Taba- Taba-Taba...". That boy is Patrick Deville and his father is the director of the asylum. From that childhood memory, the writer embarks on a journey through family history and that of France that takes us to the great-grandmother who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century from Cairo, the grandfather who lived through the Great War, the lonely aunt, Napoleon III's France, the expansion of the colonial empire, the construction of the Suez and Panama canals, the social upheavals of the 1930s, the Popular Front period, the Nazi occupation, the Vichy regime, liberation... Memory, the past, family ghosts, personal journeys and the events that transformed France are the threads with which the author weaves this exceptional narrative. Deville started in 2004 with Pura Vida a series of "real novels" in which, traveling through the five continents, he reconstructs historical characters and events...