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The book on the father is an exercise that dates back at least to ancient Antiquity, Alexandre Vialatte would say. Each literary season thus carries its share of stories or novels devoted to the father figure and a few months after Thibault de Montaigu (to name only him), author of the very beautiful Heart (2024 Interallié prize), Frédéric Beigbeder resurrects Jean-Michel Beigbeder (1938-2023). Son of an American and a Béarnais man, he created the profession of “headhunter” in France, first within a multinational of which he headed the French branch in the early 1960s, then at head of his own company from 1986. In fact, A man alone is also a short story of the Thirty Glorious Years, of conquering capitalism, of a state of mind made up of numbers, carelessness and consumerism. Beigbeder senior placed men and women at the helm of the largest CAC 40 companies for decades. What remains of all this? Nothing, or almost nothing, concedes the son.
Frédéric Beigbeder © JF Paga / Grasset
So, the author ofA French novel investigates and exhumes the family and intimate history of this “ businessman misanthrope » with regard to « melancholy toddler », of this playboy collecting female conquests, of this boomer who we would happily imagine in the cinema in the guise of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Before success, there was the experience of the Sorèze abbey school, a Catholic military boarding school where solitude, the feeling of abandonment and bullying forged the heart and soul of little Jean-Michel.
Cracked bell ringing
Frédéric Beigbeder does not, however, delve into pathos, dolorism, bazaar psychoanalysis, cheap psychology. He does not write more for “ avenge one’s race » (Annie Ernaux), her class or her own injuries from “ son of divorcees from the seventies “. Divided into brief chapters, like a puzzle, A man alone recounts a missed appointment: “ our two indifferences crossed. When I stopped being indifferent to him, he stopped worrying. » The object of the text for him: to meet « someone I didn’t know when he was alive “. Does he know him better after the trip? Not sure. Was Jean-Michel Beigbeder, who held passports in the name of William Harben (his American cousin, CIA agent) himself a member of the agency? The son likes to imagine it.
If Frédéric Beigbeder does not neglect the meaning of the formula which is his trademark (“ France had just been liberated when my father was imprisoned. », « Palliative care is the Chronopost of the sub-clapper. », « Getting older means replacing check-ups with a checklist. “), he makes the sound of a cracked bell ring. That of a single man now having to deal with his doubles: “ My father’s death gives me this strange feeling of being both a grown-up and a little boy. » Until the end, Jean-Michel and Frédéric remained faithful to the children they were.
Christian Authier
-> A book for the weekend
A single man • Grasset
