The accidental, absurd death of a young man. Mathias is buried and Gil then recounts at the speed of his emotions what happened. The brutality of the adult world. Daily obligations. Alcohol, which eats away. “Loving Gil” is the second novel by author Shane Haddad.
Gil, Mathias and Mathieu meet at a nightclub. A girl and two boys. They go on vacation, on a road trip, on the run or on a quest, ruin themselves with alcohol at not even thirty years old…
But Shane Haddad’s novel, “Loving Gil,” doesn’t start with that. It begins at the end, with Mathias’ funeral. The author then retraces the course of the history of this trio, as the pages progress. “I wanted to be able to focus on the emotions and interiority of my characters without getting into this idea of the plot,” explains Shane Haddad in the Vertigo show on October 9.
Nightclub, coffin, subway: an idea of claustrophobia infuses Shane Haddad’s novel, just like the music, the alcohol, the unease and the feeling of despair that animates the three heroes of this novel. “This idea that everything is over before it even begins, I believe that it is something that I went through and which belongs to our generation,” confides the French writer.
A quest for love
In “Loving Gil”, Gil questions his place, his body. What does it mean to be in this world, to inhabit this body? What is desire, love, sex, sexualities? With disconcerting jerky writing, Shane Haddad questions today’s world in a text that seems to be declaimed. Also a playwright, the author says she heard Gil’s voice very clearly in her head when writing this second novel.
The writer explores through her three characters a quest for love and loves. “I believe that there is an escape in Gil, where in Mathieu and Mathias there is an attempt at quest, at anchoring. Gil, even if she is the driving force behind this journey, will try to stick to this movement “, underlines the author.
Find your place
After “Toni tout court” in 2021, “Aimer Gil” is the second novel by Shane Haddad. Two very different stories, but which are nevertheless not unrelated. “There’s a continuity in taking a female character and exploring what it’s like to be a woman at 25 for Gil, at 20 for Toni. Toni is not Gil, however, and Gil is not Toni, but I feel that I wanted to think again about these bodies which grow, to make a trace”, indicates the author.
In Shane Haddad’s writing, there is a desire to give women a voice and put them back at the center of the story: “I wanted to give a woman a voice, because her perspective is not the same on the world. It is more jerky, more jarring (…) We are still at a historical moment where we, women, are obliged to break patterns to feel in our place.
Comments collected by Pierre Philippe Cadert
Web adaptation: Lara Donnet
Shane Haddad, “Aimer Gil”, POL editions, August 2024.
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