The very title of this new book refers to this idea of autofiction that Camille Laurens practices. At the height of their love, Gilles and Claire make promises to each other. She swears to him not to write about their love in a future novel and he promises never to betray her. But promises only hold for those who believe in them and in this novel they will be crushed by the torment of this love.
Yet everything had gone so well: love at first sight, like in romantic romances. Claire is struck by Gilles, so handsome, so charming. He is a puppet theater director. She should have seen it straight away as a manipulator who will pull the strings, as if she were just a doll.
The entire first part of the novel, the longest, tells of this love with its somewhat clichéd moments: the southern sun, the mimosa, the house bought together in Hyères. They make love without getting tired.
gullLove is as long as you believe in it.
The reader knows from the outset that this will end badly with a blow dealt to Gilles by Claire in their villa in Hyères, Gilles' long coma and a trial in court, but the signs of the upcoming drama only appear little by little. . At the beginning, Claire is blinded by love, sees nothing, and if she has questions, Gilles, like a perfect pervert, has a way of turning her doubts around as if she were inventing, having become paranoid.
Predator
The second, shorter part is the most exciting. Claire this time has understood and rewinds her story with Gilles, seen this time in Gilles' Machiavellian mind.
Camille Laurens wisely quotes William Faulkner who said “Literature does not serve to see better. It only serves to better measure the thickness of the shadow.”
Her love story becomes one of deception by a man “narcissist incapable of loving anyone, starting with himself.” The women he seduces are his puppets: “You know how to move them without being moved, manipulation is your profession, your very vocation and you exercise it with enough success so far but boredom also has strings to its bow. You must therefore fight hard, find always other dolls to dress, fresh puppets to look at.” Gilles appears as a predator driven by the need to “seduce, reduce, destroy”.
Who is Degas' little dancer?
-We also think of Anatomy of a fallthe film by Justine Triet which also ended with a trial and which also opposed two writers like Claire and Gilles here with the jealousies that this can create.
Where is the truth, where is the fantasy when Claire says that Gilles one day knocked over a vase on his computer? Was he trying to prevent her from writing? Or even electrocute him?
Camille Laurens delves deep into the twists and turns of the human psyche, into the traps of love and the power of contemporary narcissism.
The third part is the judicial epilogue, the surprise of which will be left to the reader.
⇒ Your promise | Novel | Camille Laurens | Gallimard, 356 pp., €22.50, digital €15
EXTRACT
“Your past has eaten up your whole future: one day we are humiliated and that day lasts forever. People there are things and you are a fool disguised as a human, a betrayed child empty of joy in a house built with bricks of hatred, a despair, a nothingness, a stifled anguish, a sad executioner always sent back and you can't do anything about it, no: the world is teeming with innocent monsters.
