It is a romance novel, a romance novel for those forgotten by history with a destiny that is both funny and melancholic. After dedicating The FlightsGoncourt of the first novel, to the fatal fall of Franz Reichelt under the Eiffel Tower in 1912, victim of his failed parachute, Étienne Kern is interested in another inventor, better known but just as mocked: Émile Coué. In limpid, tender and gently ironic prose, the Lyon author follows his antihero from his little life as a provincial pharmacist in Troyes, to the glory on the other side of the Atlantic which will take him to the White House.
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A pioneer of what we would call personal development today, we are amused to see “the faith in words” that this sincere champion of positive thinking had, imagining through autosuggestion that the mere fact of saying that we were going to get better could help achieve that. A modest doctor observing his own limits, if we happily go through the beginnings of hypnosis or alternative medicine, Étienne Kern’s Émile Coué is indeed a real character in a novel. “Life hurts less when you live it with words. » The character and the author end up becoming one in this declaration of love for literature, whose melancholic humor manages to make us touch our own limits, witnessing illnesses and deaths with the narrator. A moving, funny, mysterious novel, which never confuses gravity with gravity.
The better lifeby Étienne Kern (Gallimard, 187 pages, €19.50).
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