The damned. Lost soldiers, forgotten war. Thus we could summarize the fate of those who, sent to Saigon and Diên Bien Phu, discovered that they were only the auxiliaries of an empire in tatters, of the most odious colonialism. What followed for them was what always follows in such cases: death, everywhere, its perfume, its obscenity. As Paul-Bernard, the hero of Corentin Durand’s second (and absolutely sublime) novel, observes, Sarabandes. Engaged in the theater of operations in 1953, in the cinematographic service of the armies, this young man dreamed of being a filmmaker, Godard before Godard, camera on his shoulder, cinema verite. However, what appears under his lens is not staged and is rather the work of Hieronymus Bosch… 2018, Paul-Bernard is dead. He takes with him the memory of the Trente Glorieuses and that of these rice fields that he has never really been able to leave behind. Also that of his best friend, Angelo, known in Indochina through a strange doctor keen on Zen mystics and who committed suicide after a chaotic career as a yéyé singer. At Paul-Bernard’s funeral, his son, Pierre, meets Veronica, a former porn actress who was his father’s muse when he abandoned his artistic ambitions for the X production – with a certain success, which only underlined its failure. Pierre is now the recipient of these secrets and these sorrows, of these blurred silhouettes between Paris, the Atlantic coast and Vietnam. Heavy load for a fragile boy…
Here is the plot of Sarabandes X. And that’s nothing yet. A great novel – and this is an immense one – is always much more than a story, much more than a novel. There, it’s a black opera, a rumination towards the sky. It is The damned by Visconti revised by Genet. From this second book, Corentin Durand confirms, first of all, that he is without doubt, and at only 28 years old, one of the greatest stylists of this time. And then, that style only has meaning for him in that it is the vehicle of a vision that is at once political, aesthetic and more or less erotic. Crazy ambition. It’s incredible that she is so accomplished.
Corentin Durand
Sarabandes
Threshold
Edition: 3500 copies.
Price: €22.50; 400 p.
ISBN: 9782021564907
