Lola Lafon is a blade. Those sharp enough to remove the thick crust of the ambient ready-to-think in the blink of an eye. She proves it vividly in her latest book published Wednesday January 8 by Stock editions.
A collection of “exact fictions”crossed by personal and collective news from past months, and whose reading proves to be extremely stimulating at the start of the year. The opportunity for her to question the mythologies of the time and to outline the main principles of a line of life celebrating permanent action, solidarity and the performative power of language.
For this book, Lola Lafon did not want to write a novel, any more than a logbook or an essay. She wanted to write a text “from stories that connect us or oppose us”as she explained in December on the stage of the Rond-Point theater where she came to present a reading of a few extracts. But above all, the desire for it to be “a collective newspaper”resonant, to say how a writer copes with the events he endures throughout a year, at a safe distance, according to the advice his father once gave him. “It’s a short sentence written on a loose sheet of paper, a few words that my father addressed to me after a discussion during which we were unable to agree : ‘Make sure to keep the right distance from what you will go through, to remember the horizon, like a lesson always in progress’.”
The idea germinated in 2023 when she began publishing monthly columns for Liberation in the form of carte blanche (and which she still fulfills regularly), gradually increasing them with more personal confidences, well-felt aphorisms, and quasi-sociological reflections, ultimately composing an ultra-relevant x-ray of the disorder of our companies. Everything is there and it is a pure pleasure to read. From the absurd injunctions of unbridled capitalism to the daily renunciations of disoriented citizens finding themselves paying dearly to blow up plates in Fury Roomsthese release rooms where you are allowed to break everything to clear your nerves. Lola Lafon perfectly deconstructs the way we are spoken to.
Firstly because it excels at rooting out the ordinary villainies hidden behind our most innocuous gestures. This “tiny empathy” that she finds herself feeling one day when faced with a homeless person who is too blonde to be honest: “It’s ugly, this thought that crosses us when we see you: if she can afford to dye her hair… Our passion for kindness – this word that we gargle about all the time in Instagram posts and personal development books – finds its limit (…) The misery that convinces us is that which does not bother us too much: it is without odor, without anger, without incoherent speech, without alcoholic breath. A misery of cinema. To move us, we must appear ‘for good’ in need.”
But especially when it sets out to analyze certain collective blindnesses which have resulted in delaying the explosion of the #Metoo movement. Starting with that of his generation. “We, children of the years 1980, we believed in a fiction. (…) Feminism ? It was old fashioned : it belonged to our mothers. The brands, the songs, praised light feminism, urging us to ‘believe in ourselves’. Just Do It. I embraced this story with naive enthusiasm.” And to urge men to make more noise from now on, alongside those who waited too long to make it.
Of course, Lola Lafon doesn’t have the answers to everything, and she often doubts in the face of the murderous madness of the men lost in the wars that have punctuated our news this year. “To the disaster, we added disaster, the dead, we killed them a second time, each time we procrastinated, estimating to the nearest gram the dose of empathy suitable for the hungry, the bombed, the raped. Distant wars offer us the possibility of seeing ourselves as we are, in an overwhelming mirror, a desert of humanity. (…) It is a commitment that we make with ourselves. That of remaining fundamentally perplexed, when hatred has the force of certainty.” But there again, she is looking for a way. She tries, because “perhaps only our attempts count. (…) So, let’s start again. Let’s fight back, even if we are a little disarmed.”
“It was never too late” by Lola Lafon (Stock editions), 227 pages, 19,50 euros
Extract : “I have swallowed some vileness lately, I have gorged myself on it. To ‘see’. To ‘know’. Because it is there, available, on social networks ; because coaxing my anger, feeding it, temporarily distracts me from an unbearable feeling of powerlessness. Sometimes it is more exhilarating to rant than to doubt. The political mood of the country, this race for hatred won alternately by the right from the right and by the left from the left, does not help us to leave this terrain, that of a rhetoric of revenge, of “they ‘have well deserved’ that we cultivate with a disturbing passion. We all lost something this fall : an indefinable thing, which, like everything that is rare and priceless, disappears without noise and is not missed. Until the moment when his loss grips us, the memory of an old friendship. We abandoned it without even thinking about it, this thing that we could call our humanity, ‘kindness for one’s fellow human beings’.” (page 149)
