Diaty Diallo - Silencio Book Club

Diaty Diallo is an author and artist whose work lies at the crossroads of literature and performance. She brings her texts to life by reading, performing, and singing them on stage. Her debut novel, Two seconds of burning air (Seuil, 2022), met with great success. For this literary season, she publishes the novel Darya & Dounya, whose heroine Dounya seems to do everything backwards since entering her thirties. She splits up with her lover, has to leave the apartment they shared, and gets fired from her job in the nonprofit sector. The time has come to take stock.

Packing her boxes, Dounya sorts through her archives and thus reconnects with Darya, the dreamy, eccentric, and nonchalant young girl she once was. The one she thinks she sacrificed by becoming an adult. Through a fragmented memory, she recounts the key moments, mistakes, and detours that built her.

And it is through writing that she decides to address those who harmed her: a series of letters, harsh and humorous, addressed to the men she encountered along her path, draws an uncompromising inventory of everyday masculinism.

This novel puts the heroine back at the center of her own story, with ferocity, mockery, and tenderness.