Every week, we invite you to read something new, a classic or a book to rediscover.
Life better by Anna Gavalda
What happened to Anna Gavalda? No new book since 2017 and Split the armor. If many of his readers must find the time long, we can only salute the attitude of a writer who does not feel obliged to fuel editorial production if inspiration and desire are not there. In the meantime, we will read or reread some of his works like Life betterpublished in 2014, which featured, through two long short stories, ordinary people deciding, after an encounter, to give an unexpected boost to their planned existence.
First here is Mathilde, twenty-four years old, an art history student, but who works in her brother-in-law’s company where she has to write false comments on Internet sites. She lives in a shared apartment in an 18th century apartment with Pauline and Julie, wise and boring twins, while Mathilde never refuses a drink or an evening. Charged by her roommates with giving ten thousand euros in cash to the contractor who renovated their apartment, she forgets her handbag containing the money in a café. A few days later, a man contacted her to return it to her. Without revealing the rest of the adventures, let us specify that the good (?) Samaritan resembles Zach Galifianakis in Very Bad Trip without the beard: a “ big bather with a vaguely bovine air and an overall limited vocabulary “. Let us also point out that the boy is walking around with a suitcase full of knives, that he is missing a finger and is wearing a jacket smelling of goat’s cheese…
Piercing and loving gaze
Next comes Yann, twenty-six years old, who after brilliant studies sells domestic robots “ in a kind of high tech mess “. Thanks to his permanent contract, he sees the prospect of being able to go into debt to continue having to earn his living in order to get into further debt. His girlfriend Mélanie, a medical visitor, fits perfectly into the landscape. But Yann’s comfortable normality is disturbed by a background noise, that of the chaos of the world, and above all by a certain melancholy. One evening, after having done a favor for his upstairs neighbors, he is invited to dinner at their house. Nothing will be the same again…
From these profiles and these banal situations, Anna Gavalda draws two stories that are both timeless in terms of their motives, but anchored in our present like this tirade on these machines which accompany us and shape us: “ This permanent state of withdrawal, this hole in your side, these phones that you constantly gnaw, these screens that you always have to unlock, these lives that you buy to be able to continue playing, this wound, this bung, these tightness in your pocket? This way you have, all, always, all the time checking if we haven’t left you a note, a message, a sign, a reminder, a notification, an ad… anything. (…) All these distractions which distract you from yourself, which have made you lose the habit of thinking about yourself, of dreaming of yourself, of chatting with the base, of learning to know or recognize yourself, of look at others, smile at strangers “.
Also at ease in the dense novel (Together, that’s all) than in the news (I would like someone to wait for me somewhere, The great Escape), Anna Gavalda’s talent lies first and foremost in her sense of detail and her laser eye. “ The most moving thing is never obvious since it is the look that finds it ”, we can read here. “The people we love, we don’t meet them, let’s see, we recognize them », Declares a character at another moment. Gavaldian art is thus perfectly summarized. A piercing and loving gaze.
Christian Authier
> A book for the weekend
Life better – The Dilettante
