In a lively and humorous story, the heroine, a young doctoral student, is entrusted with the task of establishing the archives of the author of the Erasers. Letters, manuscripts, photos, posters, even the smallest food or travel expenses: it is necessary to classify all the documents that the couple of compulsive hoarders who were Alain and Catherine Robbe-Grillet were able to keep.
Also, like the “Chief” of Imec, described as a “reader of readers”among other tasty sketches of important figures in French publishing, No respect he is apparently addressing an audience interested in going behind the scenes of Parisian literary circles.
But what gives it the universal scope of a coming-of-age novel is the look of this young woman arriving in an environment whose codes she does not master, and which Emmanuelle Lambert recomposes with great sincerity and intelligence. and liveliness.
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The Robbe-Grillets and the SM
The story details, cheerful but not too muchthe evolution of the relationship between this young irreverent researcher and a writer whose fame and fortune are made – a strictly professional relationship, although the sexual question appears more than once on the radar, in uncompromising and often funny pages on the morals of this curious couple.
Without dwelling on it, the heroine sees her own vision of desire and social norms shaken, in particular during her meetings with Catherine Robbe-Grillet, who, in addition to her writings under the pseudonym Jeanne de Berg, was known for organizing sadomasochistic scenes – practices of consensual domination to which her husband was not insensitive.
In his eyes, sometimes confused, tired, indignant, but not naive, we also see, in mirror, reflected a universe which remains very masculine. Not only that, and that is fortunate, since she can find, within and outside the walls of the Institute, support and a path towards emancipation.
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The difficulty of Emmanuelle Lambert's project was to find the balance, the right distance between the author and her subject, embodied by her fictional double, without bringing everything back to herself. A generally successful bet, although, by moving away from the literary microcosm and the narrative center of gravity that are the Robbe-Grillet, we sometimes lose interest.
From a more collective point of view, it is also the portrait of an era. Or rather the introspective dive, after MeToo, of an entire generation into the era that built it. How can we consider the relationship between power and sexuality, between perversion and creation, then and today? This is one of the open questions in the last part of the text, the strongest.
⇒ No respect | Novel | Emmanuelle Lambert | Stock, 225 pp., €20, digital €15
Extract :
“When we say that we can no longer say anything, perhaps we sincerely believe that this new access to a word that we can no longer ignore, this tear in the heart of silence, has come about on the back of freedom of expression. That we can no longer say anything because others are speaking, as if there were a quota of public speech available, the silent crowd only being able to express themselves on the condition of. a drastic reduction in the speech of chatterboxes.
Now, what the women meant was that even what the law prohibited, custom tolerated, which said: the children belong to you; what happens in families is none of our business; and as for women, adults, minors: open bar. Speaking in numbers, they revealed the statistical truth. What we thought was deviance was actually the norm.
The moral of the story being that there is, alas, nothing unrealistic about cruel tales.”
