With When the horses arrivean intimate and dreamlike novel published ten years after its first success, The man who liesMarc Lavoine marks his return to literature. Expected in bookstores on January 15, from Éditions Fayard, this text explores in depth the theme of mourning through a son watching over his dying mother in a world where landmarks fade and where time seems suspended. Faced with the imminent loss of this irreplaceable woman, the main character plunges into a state where the border between reality and imagination fades. Throughout the pages, the story oscillates between the lucidity of the son and the apparent confusion of the mother, who perhaps reinvents the world in her own way.
“My little rat, I hope that all my stories don’t disturb you too much and that you begin to feel the passage from my soul to yours. I prepared for it. I know that, for you, it’s a shock, but we have to calm things down, it’s not the end of the world, quite the contrary. It’s a big meeting we’re having, you and I, my rat. I have to put everything in order on my side, I’m almost there. But you have things to do, if you will trust me“, confides the maternal character in a poignant passage. This voice accompanies the narrator in a quest to reconcile art, life and death, by making the imagination a refuge from pain.
Rendezvous with the afterlife
The novel is a tribute by the author to his mother, who died in 2011. “Mom died badly. Maybe it’s my fault. But today, she asks me to stop carrying this heavy weight and to stop destroying myself, and to fully live the life I have to live. Mom asked me, one night when I was dreaming of her, to recount the poetic life she had in silence, and to rewrite her death worthy of the unconditional love that was ours. So there you have it, Mom, this novel is yours. And what I have left of us. There where the before paradise is, in the meadow at the end of the world, when the horses arrive“, explains Marc Lavoine in the preface to this work based on his story, after an epigraph from The Promise of Dawn by Romain Gary.
With When the horses arrivethe singer and actor Marc Lavoine confirms his talent as a writer after the 100,000 copies sold of his first novel, hailed for its artistic sensitivity. “It’s not a goodbye, but a meeting“, seems to promise this new book which invites us to see loss as a transformation, and pain as a source of creation.
