In his novel, By the roads published in 2019, Sylvain Prudhomme featured the character of a hitchhiking narrator; with Coyote – published by Editions de Minuit -, he himself becomes this character and recounts, through a story surprisingly constructed by the dialogues of the motorists he meets, this 2,500 km journey along the Mexican border, from California to the Gulf of Mexico. He recorded these exchanges, by hand, in a notebook: “there is a game through this gesture, with the motorist, we laugh together about that; what the recorder does not create, perhaps by taking notes they open up more, they see that it “is taken seriously.”
A new car story for the author of The Child in the Taxi (2023), which takes stock of the sociological and economic fabric of this border region.
Hearing motorists
With this book, Sylvain Prudhomme had a particular idea in mind: “I wanted to put the words of motorists at the heart of the book, I wanted us to hear them for a long time, with the tempo of their words, when we stay with them for a long time, we feel the energy that emanates from them” .
Although he sometimes takes the narrative into his voice, he wanted it to remain elliptical.
