Books: the chilling thrills of a “National Romance”

The editorial team advises you

Because a warning informs you from the beginning: the first part is first of all a “New Romance”, which tells the love story as improbable as it is irrepressible experienced by a left-wing and tidy fifty-something Latin professor, Mehdi, for Joséphine, star of new romance, and above all a very fashionable influencer in the fascist sphere. The reader who already knows Mehdi Ouraoui, who excited us with “My Ghost”, imagines finding the character of this first novel released in 2023.

New romance and fascist

Which may be true… Or false, as the Pau author, now exiled in the Basque Country, likes to play with literary codes and identities to tell the emotions of an old left-wing man for a tendron with more than right-wing sympathies. This “new romance” is in fact only the pretext to introduce Reda Saladdin, the real narrator of this “National Romance”.

The editorial team advises you

Reda wrote the famous successful new romance, which was even adapted for radio, but since then it has run out of steam… He does have a project that is both literary and investigative, to look back on the racist crimes perpetrated in France over the last thirty years, but it is slipping. Until an old high school friend, Franck Lavalière, a former showbiz businessman who became an executive of the main far-right party in France, invited him to tell him the story of the meteoric rise of this movement. founded, however, by post-war reprobates. Because behind the desire for notability, there is the story of a radical movement, “Them”, as the narrator calls them, ready to do anything to trivialize themselves, even to oust this historical framework, the architect of “de-demonization”. to young people who are nevertheless restless in a gang of Parisian skinheads.

Strange encounter

It is in this part of the strange reunion between a writer and a politician now reprobated following a scandal over outrageous remarks published in the press, that we find the pen of Mehdi Ouraoui. The man knows how to write with the finesse that a novel requires more than a romance. He deciphers the upheavals of a disoriented society, finds the ridiculousness of situations, rarely anathemas to clear his conscience, and gives humanity to all his characters, even the most repulsive, at least the main ones. But above all, it scratches once again in these folds of an old country which no longer recognizes itself and no longer really knows where to go, except that it shows the unfortunate tendency to pitch more and more towards the abyss.

“National romance”, by Mehdi Ouraoui, 192 pages, 19.90 euros.