“Love Gil” by Shane Haddad: a novel about existential malaise and the romantic disorders of today’s youth

Shane Haddad’s beautiful novel, Love Gil, begins with the accidental death of Mathias and the reunion at his funeral of the protagonists of a story that the writer then tells us.

The author, Shane Haddad, is 27 years old, lives in Le Havre, and Love Gil is his second novel after Toni in short in 2021.

Shane Haddad’s debut novel: Twenty-four hours in the life of a young woman

Gil is a 25-year-old woman who explains: “Twenty-five years have passed and I have so little time left. And I have done nothing.” Shane Haddad imagines a Jules and Jim (the famous Truffaut film) but feminist, current and with a completely different outcome.

Gil is a woman in search of meaning and love (the title is an injunction to love her), in a world that she sees as very dark despite the alcohol that flows abundantly throughout the novel.

The young writer has sentences of dazzling beauty like Beckett: “Let’s tear up the everyday together”said Gil. How to escape “to live our days in the fearful idiocy of salaried employment.” “Working life is seeing your parents leave it to die in silence.”

She believes in friendship with Mathieu, and also with Mathias, whom she met one night in a club. She calls them her two M’s and with her, they form a trio of friends who leave in Mathieu’s old, rotten Clio for a road trip in the south of France where they discover Camus’ tomb and immerse themselves in the streets of Avignon during the festival.

Singular writing

But Gil wonders. And will never stop wondering, without answers, about what love and friendship are. Words are powerless to define them. Aren’t the first words of the novel “I have nothing to say.” ?

Shane Haddad’s writing accentuates this fog of feelings with short sentences, full of energy but often unfinished, stopped in mid-flight, “lost in the elusiveness of thought”she wrote.

In their old car, Gil and his two friends cross France, a trio.lost, fleeing or searching”.

They meet a third M, Marguerite, Mathias’ aunt, who remained a 1968er, who was a second mother to him but hid a heavy secret from him that she revealed to him during her stay.

Gil sees her trio with the two M’s change little by little but radically. While she had a bond on the crest between friendship and love with Mathieu and Mathias, these two fall in love with each other, leaving her on the side.

And Gil said to himself: “Loneliness is there as if I had just been born into this crazy world. I lie down on the warm stone, my eyes fixed on the fading sky. “

Love Gil is a novel about existential malaise and the romantic disorders of today’s youth. But it is also a unique and brilliant writing exercise, where words express ideas without ever exhausting them, leaving room for all that is repressed in life.

⇒ Love Gil | Novel | Shane Haddad | POL, 366 pp., €21, digital €15

EXTRACT

“Boredom is hot here, boredom was freezing over there. The flat earth, the electric cables and this heartbreaking boredom. Nothing was within my reach. I fled in silence. I tell her I’m running away too. Running away from my responsibilities, love, sex. Everything. We smile. And then she tells me again like the first night we met, it’s hard to be your age. I tell her it’s just hard to live. She doesn’t answer.”