FABRICE HUMBERT

En juin 1952, dans une rue de Madrid, Manuel Odriga, est pris à partie par un officier franquiste. Recherché pour meurtre, il quitte son pays et s''engage dans la Légion étrangère. Il rencontre Jeann

Paris, June 1995. In a luxury restaurant, a waiter is violently attacked by a guest. No one moves. Neither the Russian couple, nor the wife of the aggressor, nor the two young traders come to celebrate their first jobs on the floor. This book questions the responsibility of each of us and shows that to do nothing is also an action.

This title is the winner of the inaugural French Orange Prize in 2009 and the Prix Renaudot''s livre de poche prize. During a school trip to Buchenwald concentration camp, a young French teacher comes across a photograph of a man whose resemblance to his own father, Adrien, is uncanny. However, the man has a different name and died in 1942. Returning to France, he finds that the memory of the photograph refuses to leave him. He decides to embark on a search for its subject, which takes him to the Buchenwald archives, to the heart of the Nazi machine, but more disturbingly, draws him into the dark heart of his own family. Eventually, he is brought face-to-face with his own capacity for violence. A subtle, moving book, "The Origins of Violence" shows the limitless ways in which humans inflict harm on each other, and how individual people, not societies, are the perpetrators.