Tiffany McDaniel’s second winning move

All those who had the pleasure of discovering Tiffany McDaniel with “Betty” last year wondered what the American novelist, poet and visual artist could well publish after this family confession that she had taken seventeen years to write.

While she had struggled to find a publisher for her moving Indian legend, the book won her seven literary prizes, including the FNAC Novel Prize and the America Prize for Best Foreign Novel 2020. has melted” has just won the 2022 Booksellers Weekly Book Awards in the foreign literature category.

This second opus confirms the originality, imagination and poetry of the autodidact from Ohio. Qualities that allow him to deal with themes as dark as racism, the rejection of difference or the mistreatment of children in a luminous way. The subject is however more allusive than in “Betty”, the treatment of human wickedness and afflictions more metaphorical.

We are in 1984, “the year when, according to George Orwell, we would manage to be convinced that two and two make five”. In this scorching month of August which will reveal the pains, frustrations and anger of a town in the foothills of the Appalachians, the furnace is such that it melts the ice cream but also the common sense of the population.

How to explain, if not, that everyone is convinced that Sal, a black boy suddenly arrived in town, is the Devil personified although he has no hooves and horns and wears, instead of reptile skin, filthy overalls too wide for her frail silhouette?

Innocence lost

Apart from the Bliss family who welcomes him, the inhabitants of Breathed will accuse him of so many evils that they will succeed in sabotaging their once paradisiacal community. And it is with longing for lost innocence that the narrator, Fielding, will remember all his life the period leading up to the devastating summer of his 13th birthday.

The happy time when he lived pampered by his prosecutor father, conveniently called Autopsy because he wanted to “see for yourself”, by his agoraphobic mother recreating the countries of the world in her house failing to leave it, and his eldest, Grand, fragile incarnation of wasp perfection. A wildly endearing little group that will now rub shoulders with “Betty” in our imagination of deep America.