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Every week, a reader reviews a favorite. Today, chaos at recess.
Some say life is a dream, others an imaginary illness. In Unable life is a struggle, and going through existence fully is like waging all-out war. It’s difficult to summarize this first novel by Ugo Riou, whose dialogues with a warlike tone and absurd logic gradually reveal the different layers of fiction.
The characters are primary school children subjected to the delusions of an authoritarian teacher who strives to carry out her teaching which consists of unteaching her students everything. Their status as school children is superimposed on that of actors in a play but also soldiers in a conflict which some clues suggest is the Second World War. Enlisted against their will in this class-casting-battalion, the teacher urges them to move towards the future – which is reduced to a “point on the horizon” – nothing could be more unreal!
The story seems to move forward without precise direction: the chaos of the playground and the battlefield seem to be perpetrated live on the stage. Damn school system – filth of war! The educational and stage conditions are calamitous: an abysmal blackboard, tricycles, a turnstile, a sun infested with rats, and among the actors a janitor-stagehand in underwear, a piece of gravel, an old apple tree, a dead cat. In reaction to the juggernaut of the school, resistance is required to sabotage everything in joy and horror.
The days seem
