Every week, we invite you to read something new, a classic or a book to rediscover.
While Nicolas Fargues’ new book, the remarkable We’re the bad boy we can be (autobiographical story around the experience which saw the writer lead a writing workshop for several months at the Santé prison), was released at the beginning of October; we can happily immerse ourselves in the work of one of our best active authors. Of Owner’s Towerpublished in 2000 and which marked his entry into literature, recently The Expiration passing through One Man Show, Nice role, The summer novel or In the land of the little oneFargues composed novels in the form of comedies of manners and characters, more or less acidic and cruel, also exploring the fractures, the preconceived ideas, the mutations, the mentalities of our time.
Nicolas Fargues © Hannah Assouline / POL
I was behind youreleased in 2006, occupies a special place in the writer’s bibliography. Indeed, the greatest public success to date for the writer, the novel is built on a minimalist framework and a formal challenge since it is the monologue of a narrator. Thus, a young thirty-year-old, married, father of two children, living and working in Madagascar, tells a mute interlocutor the story of the in-flight explosion of his model couple. He cheated on her, she cheated on him, but it was on the terrace of a restaurant in Italy that he fell apart. A little note from an unknown person slipped by the server on which is written “ I was behind you. Alice » and a telephone number provoke in our man a curiosity mixed with pride. Obviously, he meets her the next day and discovers a young Italian girl, blonde and full of grace. Their adventure, intended to be only a nice memory, will however continue in Madagascar.
Dangerous connections
Nicolas Fargues engages here in a delightful game of massacre written in drypoint. With him, no one is really fooled by the truths and lies that make up or reshape destinies. We play, we move, we strike poses, we reveal our hearts. Like his hero or anti-hero, the writer alternates tones and climates without loosening the framework of a cleverly carried out plot. A vitriolic painting of maneuvers between spouses – trench warfare, blitzkrieg, armistice, etc. – can be replaced by a delicate evocation of simple joys. The writing, both supple and tense, nervous and falsely relaxed, follows the meanders and digressions of the monologue. The balance of power is being reversed. We don’t know if all this will end in blood or laughter.
The introspective thirty-year-old I was behind you is narcissistic, manipulative, cowardly, hypocritical, selfish, vain but also sincere, naive, fair, romantic. This ” upset free man » swims between the sensitive and the grotesque, the natural and the caricature. All of Nicolas Fargues’ art lies precisely in the perception of this delicate balance, this harmony of opposites that is life. Is it a singular story, inhabited by passion or a banal separation that he tells us there? The truth is undoubtedly between the two, but the author of I’m not a heroine has the intelligence to never deliver her. He doesn’t judge, he exposes. Her I was behind you has a nicely revisited classicism. The tangy violence of a moral tale knitted by a Laclos or a Rohmer in the age of SMS.
Christian Authier
> A book for the weekend
I was behind you P.O.L.
