ÇIt often begins with end-of-year celebrations from which we want to escape, if we can; with books for example.
It starts with Photo on request by Simon Chevrier, of course, since I was able to follow a few steps until it was published and I had to host a meeting at the Les mots à la bouche bookstore at the beginning of January. I do not want to give in to the somewhat sneaky imperative according to which it is necessary go through ithaving to read the new September and January novels like clockwork. I want to read what might please me.
To my booksellers, then, I ask: do you have some recommendations among the January releases? They are starting to know and understand my tastes now. I note, I note, I make my selection. I collect or receive the works. I read them, on trains or on family sofas, I take notes.
I start with the first novels, and I try to see what could constitute the guidelines for this new school year. What could possibly unite Juliet Drouar, Simon Chevrier, Clothilde Salelles and Julien Perez who respectively signed their first novel, which will be released this January? Let's say it quickly: for the first three, the careful, more or less successful analysis of the family unit and the father's place in it. The last, a composite book on the contemporary art world and ways of paying homage(s).
Let's get started, then.
*
A photograph first. The one on the banner of Simon Chevrier's book: Photo on request. We have to wait until page 29 for us to encounter it in the book: “ […] a black and white shot of a young man with his body bent, sucking his toe. » The author meets her in the apartment of a lover; he then goes looking for him, in a way. Search for the photographer – it’s Peter Hujar –, and above all search for the model, much less known: Daniel Schook. A snub: as soon as he seems to find something about himself, someone who knew him, it disappears, it doesn't do anything. Often people who might have known him died.
Peter Hujar's photography and the search for the model systematically take him back to the AIDS years. In this way, the epidemic of representation as it presented itself after the advent of the disease in the West is underlined. The consequent losses of artists, activists, archivists and art historians seem to be embodied by this Daniel whom the author is searching for, a real as well as fictional double who, as we know, could be decline into as many ghosts as we inherit when we grow up with this truncated heritage.
And the illness manifests itself differently throughout the pages – this is where we touch on another undoubtedly very important part of the novel: the father's illness. At the end of his life, the author visits him a few times before having to get used to a life without him; “ knowing how to be without my father “. The opportunity to return, with a brevity and a simplicity which takes nothing away from the narrative and literary force, on everything he inherits from him, in this case.
If Simon Chevrier is part of a lineage, it is that of these autofiction writers, gay or not. Christine Angot, Guillaume Dustan… We could also see a form of heritage here. Hervé Guibert: no, not really. It differs in many aspects, almost explaining why. From this family, he distinguishes himself by an approach to reality and his own description. Almost clinical, I want to say: technical. It's not cold. It's something else again.
A writing as much of absence (like an absence of oneself, sometimes), as of the missing (his father, and the model of the photo). Things are told as they are. From childhood memories to the present moment, from sex work to research work on Peter Hujar's photography… all the same. And that’s a strength: a great strength in writing.
*
So, I switch to Juliet Drouar’s book. I understand from the first sentence that it's supposed to be a child speaking. A child who is the narrator. An exercise that has always displeased me, I might as well be sincere: talking about childhood like that, with that language. This manufactured orality. I'm already trying to point out one of the problems with this book: its language. Sometimes almost illegible, confused, sometimes almost ridiculous, bombastic… This is demonstrated in particular by these explanatory footnotes which we would have done without, most of the time.
However, the political significance is there. Very close. The importance of such a story too, the possibility of a vote for minors; the possibility of speaking individually and collectively about the violence and domination suffered in childhood and adolescence, and of incest, too. The subject matter is important, which makes the critic's job even more difficult, so to speak. Giving a negative opinion seems more difficult. That is to say, we have envy to love this book. Sincerely.
However, I came out of it several times, almost all the way. Because of the style, as I said; but also because of the predictable narrative construction, as if pre-written, and yet highly implausible. This is the paradox of utopia: creating an effect of reality on a possibility. Believe et make believesomehow. So that fantasized representations can be projected, through literary space, in this case.
The right to vote would be open to minors in 2027: this is the initial premise. From this postulate arises a whole series of events more or less linked to this question, but which all revolve around the politicization of childhood and the dominations which take place there. We naturally think of the work of Tal Piterbraut-Merx on adult-child relationships, his articles and his posthumous thesis published by Blast. We also think of Juliet Drouar's other writings, brilliant and necessary – if Cui-Cui is his first novel, but it is not his first book.
-I would not like to give in to this ease, to say that Juliet Drouar should confine herself to “theoretical” writing. However, it is clear that the novel does not immediately appear to me to be the best way to present one's theses, for the moment – or perhaps with better editorial work.
*
There's a secret, first: everyone has insomniacs at home. It is about Our insomniaby Clothilde Salelles. The father's lack of sleep is authoritative, and trickles down to the rest of the family. That's how it is. Even the elements of language which become constitutive of the father's speech and those around it and which the book wants to make visible, even audible to us. Portmanteau words, spoken words that the narrator, on the border between childhood and adolescence, hears and integrates.
The sleeps are parallel. As long as the father does not sleep, she cannot sleep either. In this house in a suburban residence, in the heart of Essonne. When the noises disappear – the tap water, the soft footsteps towards the fridge – she lets herself fall asleep, since the disappearance of these household noises is the sign that the father is finally asleep. The time of insomnia is plastic. He tenses up, relaxes, depending. Days, nights, seasons. The family is the place of secrets. The secret to the key to sleep.
But something will happen. In the house, in the forest that surrounds it, populated by deceptively peaceful deer and deer. Yes, something will happen, that's for sure. The entire first part of the book is shot through with a feeling of disturbing strangeness. Despite his daughter's negative reaction each time, the father makes a joke every summer: this time, the mother doesn't come, she stays here and will let them go. He repeats it every year. The girl too, in her tears and in her anger, every time. In his deep fear of seeing his mother disappear. The father carries out this fictitious, “comical” disappearance… funny: for whom?
The attention to detail in the descriptions also contributes to this feeling. Everything is dissected with great attention, all the gestures, the behaviors, the objects, the things left behind. Always, a question: what do we inherit? And how? Is it enough to analyze your parents every day and try to do something different to stop this apparently inevitable transmission? And do classmates at school have the same parents, the same suspicious questions towards them? “ Fathers were the first victims of these rewrites. » One thing unites them: when it comes to fathers, we tend to invent a little, to embellish a reality that is not necessarily glamorous.
It is everything that happens at the end of childhood that Clothilde Salelles strives to describe, to write. Partial access to adult language and understanding. To the codes of this universe. Read the newspaper, drink coffee: what for? Money problems. Everything is so far away and yet so close. On the periphery of the narrator, herself on the periphery of everything. Feelings, for example. I'll stop there, I don't want too much; a large part of the book focuses on the description of a Afterand to talk about it here I would have to reveal too much.
*
I end up Tributes by Julien Perez, a little apart in this selection of first novels – notably by his very clear refusal of narration. It's about something else. How to draw someone's outline? Literally. How to tell it? Tell it? Several people speak. Paint a portrait of someone. The fiction is there, immediately: since the points of view are multiple and subjective, nothing is true; or rather, everything is. Someone is dead. He was an artist.
He had imagined an exhibition where nothing was hung on the walls. Rather, people, people who said the same thing throughout the day, during the opening hours of the exhibition. More than a hundred people. Their speeches were undoubtedly arranged over the hours, all through interchanges and entanglements.
The farewell ceremony as written by Julien Perez seems rather similar to this imaginary and imagined exhibition. We almost doubt it: did all these people who talk really exist? Or are they just avatars of one person? The portrait is also theirs. And from a certain environment, the world of Parisian contemporary art, from schools to exhibitions and performances, and all the relationships that are formed and unraveled in these designated places. Bars, institutions, collectors’ residences, etc.
The literary device itself, which gives the title of the book, Tributesbecomes yet another thing as the noose tightens. The characters search in the void. In a Beckettian gesture – not the language, more the concept – they search, they wait for something to happen, for the artist to return, perhaps. The book object itself becomes an object of contemporary art, as it seems to enclose this whole small universe, narrow and immense at the same time, made of networks, these little figurines which speak without ever stopping, which tell and tell down to the sometimes insignificant details – these are often the most beautiful.
Memories and flashes, this is undoubtedly where the great beauty of Julien Perez's book lies, in its controlled flights; and this is how he signs perhaps the most unique book of this literary season, by composing with all his characters the chessboard of a person and his memory.
Simon Chevrier, Photo on requestStock editions, January 2025, 178 p., €20
Juliet Drouar, Cui-Cuieditions of Le Seuil, January 2025, 192 p., €20 €50
Clothilde Salelles, Our insomniaeditions L’arbalète/Gallimard, January 2025, 256 p., €20.50
Julien Perez, TributesPOL editions, January 2025, 376 p., €22
