“Aesthetica”, by Allie Rowbottom, translated from English (United States) by Théophile Sersiron, Fayard, 316 p., €23, digital €16.
Since the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, with Bible and baggage in 1620, America has known several frontiers which it has had to push back each time. The first, that of terrestrial space, was achieved thanks to pioneering ardor and the colonial and military-industrial steamroller. The second, celestial space, continues to be so, transforming the clouds into a cosmodrome, a waste dump and, soon, a tourist site. It would seem that a third frontier responds to the Yankee craving, an eternal challenge to measure oneself: the body.
Pampered, adored, remodeled, exhibited, is the human body a border or an ultimate wall? This is the question posed, with Aestheticaher first novel, by Los Angeles writer and academic Allie Rowbottom. Aesthetica entrusts, even throws into pasture, to the reader the formidable figure of Anna, 19 years old, a fanatic Instagrammer who decides to throw the sexy target of her body into the battle of image, the ring of appearances, with large bursts of posts, evaluating himself every second thanks to the permanent barometer of the eyes of his followers: “Only my ass mattered.” The exterior and nothing else. » An anatomical epic and a race for visibility which also responds to the desire to avenge her mother, abandoned when she was 3 years old, and barely surviving on mediocre jobs: “I wanted to take control of my story (…)earn my money, present my body. »
Making use of the slightest curves, smiles, poses and postures, betting everything on quantity and illusion, Anna ends up falling into the net of Jake Alton, “twilight vampire with eternally radiant skin”whose cuddly grip and beguiling guardianship soon make Anna, in addition to a commercial object, a sex toy available for all backroom sessions and paid orgies: “Offered to everyone, in a very cute way” (Apollinaire). Fine-tuning the spectacular abilities of his chick, stuffed with psychotropic drugs, through labial and breast operations, he wears and exhausts her to the point of madness. Coming out of this race to the abyss, having become, at 31, a disenchanted demonstrator in beauty products, Anna risks trying “Aesthetica”, a high-risk operation, carried out by the good doctor Perrault, a worthy descendant of Frankenstein. An intervention intended to erase all previous cosmetic surgery.
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