Passage of the book | Geneva Tribune

– Cyril Roger-Lacan makes us travel in business class

We had to start “thinking globally, acting brutally,” says this novelist in his first book.

Michel Audétat

Published today at 9:57 a.m.

Cyril Roger-Lacan

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The capitalism of old Europe is no longer what it was. The powerful men in Dad’s fashion, varnished with good manners, jealous of their codes which they believed to be eternal, found themselves faced with “tattooed oligarchs” and other unsociable people. Clash of cultures at the top of business, under the effect of globalization which has shaken up the entire “grammar of power relations”: we had to start “thinking globally, acting brutally”. It is this moment of change that Cyril Roger-Lacan (born in 1964) depicts in this first novel, “Corrupt”, which he published at the same time as a book of poetry (“Avant l’age”, Grasset) . We savor the tone which combines elegance, disenchanted distance, finesse and ferocity of line.

Having worked at the ENA, ministerial offices and the multinational Veolia, Cyril Roger-Lacan knows from the inside the small world inflated with its own importance whose customs, rites, pettiness and hidden resources he describes. Here we are behind the padded doors of the Compagnie Fermière, born in the 19th^e century, which is making its mark on the public services market: “One of the cards that France can play “internationally”, and it does not have that many…” But an ill wind has risen. The Company is entangled in a dirty affair in Bouzmirstan, a formerly Soviet far east over which a Kadyrov-style satrap reigns. Gone are the days of “the little French soup”, of half-hearted collusion with political powers, of “ambiguous pacts between forces who knew each other well”. The characters in the novel will notice this.

The author has no shortage of talent to make us breathe the rarefied atmosphere of the elites who travel in business class. We are bathed here in a chiaroscuro where the nuances between good and evil have been somewhat erased. The author describes this world in very beautiful language that smacks of the world of the day before yesterday: one would say the Duke of Saint-Simon (1675-1755) leaning on our globalized capitalism.

To read: “Corrupt”, Cyril Roger-Lacan, Grasset, 176 p.

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