“Nights without Kim Sauvage”, by Sabrina Calvo, La Volte, 338 p., €19.
An improbable little Thumbelina, Vic was abandoned, without being able to find her way, by her parents in search of an impossible bright future with children, in an Ikea hyperstore, where she lived hidden for several years. An orphan taken in by a luxury company to which she now belongs, she makes a living as a freelance fashion journalist.
In this futuristic bubble of Greater Paris, reality, often sordid and always cramped, has largely faded away in the face of the flamboyance of a virtual world where an “augmented” humanity – and having the means – struts under the pixelated gold of luxury fashionable. Responsible for clarifying certain retro aspects of an antique music video evoking a mopey musician in love and an inaccessible British singer, Vic, in the company of Maria Paillette, her digital assistant, slightly dysfunctional and deeply in love with her – to the point of jealousy. blacker, on occasion -, finds herself dragged, vacillating and always looking for a place for her body and for her soul, “behind the scenes”in a universe itself oscillating on the edge of unsuspected abyss, where the not only intellectual revolt of a mysterious entity named “Kim Sauvage” is now storming.
Between 2003 and 2010, William Gibson, himself operating thirty-five years after Roland Barthes of Fashion system (Seuil, 1967), was undoubtedly the first writer to confront fashion, its absorbing signs and brands, with advanced computing and virtual networks. Sabrina Calvo, with one of the most impactful and original writings of the contemporary French imagination, has been evolving for years on these uncertain borders where IT developments disrupting everyday life coexist: Toxoplasma (La Volte, 2017), a miraculous dreamlike incursion into a fictional autonomous commune of Montreal, won the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire, and Melmoth Furieux (La Volte, 2021) debunked Disney magic from its toxic base – with all rage and elegance – with its hypnotic swirls worthy of course of the snake Kaa. Who better than she could, almost fifteen years after the end of the trilogy Identifying patternsby William Gibson (Au Diable Vauvert, 2004-2013), take the torch from the great Canadian author to lead a decisive change?
This eleventh novel by Sabrina Calvo, an authentic lover of draping, draping and precise sewing, with the delightful complicity of Laurent Voulzy and Kim Wilde, certainly marks a peak in her very personal art. The language is deployed with precision, with cunning and with a tender and devastating humor. In Nights without Kim Sauvagethe spirit of the times, so willingly adulterated by the all-out marketing of luxury, takes it for granted, and is generously offered a paradoxical return to its creative and sincere source, far from artificial “increases”.
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