other lives than his own

“Remember”, said Verlaine, to say remember. In 2001, the narrator of When Cécile loses a brief childhood sweetheart, who died in a plane crash at the age of 27. The drama will then obsess and pursue him. In 130 pages, Philippe Marczewski, in his third book, will immerse us in the ebb and flow of the memory of the loved one. It will be the reign of compelling, momentous moments, evoked, transfigured in a long, single-breath sentence, held in the third person singular. Scattered, inconsolable moments, or those that have nothing to do with the past, stolen, faded or usurping images. Or the memory and its servitude. On the verge of delirium, “to force reality to conform to his obsession.”

There are furtive images of shared moments: the first chance encounter, a beach in Italy, a nighttime stroll in Venice, “like a mirage where everything is possible”the water of the fountain where the “young and bright” Cécile, at “blonde and sunny laughter”in the face…