Winner of the Georges-Nicole 2025 prize, the author Romande Anne Rogivue composes in her first novel, “like others go to the sea”, a polyphonic investigation on the disappearance of a young man in love with literature.
In 2010, at the age of 26, Paul A. disappeared. A dozen years later, Adam Delpierre, a novelist who has broken down in inspiration, returns to this event. Thanks to a coincidence, the imaginary is transposed to reality. The writer takes up the investigation, first in a factual way, then literary and fictitiously.
Throughout Anne Rogivue’s novel, it is the witnesses and close to Paul A. gradually draw his character. In turn, childhood friend, girlfriend, roommate, parent, colleague tell the young man. Everyone has a deposition to the investigator of the time Jean-Baptiste Ferrand, who yields the entire file to Adam Delpierre. Jean-Baptiste Ferrand is convinced that the writer will manage to fill the holes and perhaps solve the mystery.
And what more beautiful proposition than fiction to explore what exceeds our understanding?
Literature and its power are at the heart of this first novel by Anne Rogivue. Paul is a lover of books and writing. He is inhabited by “Lord Jim” by Joseph Conrad, which is part of the sea and the marine world. Like the writer who later will immerse himself by proxy in his own life, Paul also dreams of writing. He decides to devote most of his life to it, even if it means escaping and escaping those around him. He also nourishes the hope of being edited, until this day when he seems to definitely be missing.
With this first novel, Anne Rogivue illustrates in a disconcerting and falsely simple way the power of writing and imagination. From the first pages, fiction broke into reality. Then the readership is swayed from one to the other, like the movement of the waves of an ocean.
As for the title “Like others go to the sea”, it resonates throughout the pages of Anne Rogivue’s book. The expression is taken from a sentence from the novel “The young girls” (1936) of the writer Henry de Montherlant. It contains in substance the essence and identity of the main character Paul A., on which rests all the architecture of this first polyphonic novel signaling the advent of a new French -speaking writer.
Céline O’Clin/SF
Anne Rogivue, “Like others go to the sea”, Editions de l’Aire, April 2025.
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