In 2024, still at Éditions des Équateurs, the young adventurer does it again with Railway novel. Be careful, however, notes the publisher, lacking money and intoxicated by the previous success, the young writer delivers a story with the same recipes and big tricks as the previous one. “At first, it’s still okay. The first chapters start off smoothly and the reader will have plenty of time to get their bearings while enjoying the landscape. Then it gets carried away and [tourne] in black pudding water.” We have been warned.
However, it is difficult not to embark on the adventure of Philibert and his old sidekick, big Simon, a Breton with a reputation “good face”“liar, thief, braggart, crude, gluttonous, unkempt and willingly dishonest”. In short, a “scoundrel”just as much as “the best comrade there is”.
Our Franc-tireur by Philibert Humm
To customers of picturesque
Neither seen nor known, like the hobos, these vagabonds of the American railway, the two men therefore decide to jump on freight trains, at random about their destination. The epic, now told in Railway novelis more random than expected. From one page to the next, these “ridiculous knights, without fear and without reproach, beautiful as the stained glass windows of cathedrals” go from ecstasy to despair, and vice versa. At the turn of certain lines, Simon ahane like a “hypoglycemic shetland”, and Philibert struggles to recognize the cape. But no matter: the adventure is beautiful, rebellious, tasty.
The writing is also colorful, funny, intelligent and deeper than it appears. The portraits sketched with an alert line are friendly. Who will forget Paco, briefly encountered in the sadness of a bar? “In the following months, I often had to think about [lui], writes Philibertin his drowning eyes, in this look filled with repressed tears, the tears of cheap whiskey. Wherever he is today, at the Transports bar or elsewhere, I lift my turned-down sheepskin cap to him and give him a good handshake. I vaguely feel that he is a bit like my brother. The passenger of a train stopped in the middle of the track.”
If deep in your soul you recognize in yourself “a picturesque customer”if you like riding an open cart in the air of free France, go to your bookseller, you will not regret it.
The Micheline. Philibert Humm’s French Bar Crawl
⇒ Railway novel | Roman | Philibert Humm | The Ecuadorians, 240 pp., €22
EXTRACT
“I then had to find an adventure buddy. The guys capable of following you on such a move can be counted on the fingers of a mine-sweeper’s hand. I decided to call Simon. Simon is one of my dearest and old friends. We’re lucky if we have four or five real friends. By “real friend” I mean the one you can wake up in the middle of the night under any pretext, for example helping to make a body disappear, and who comes to lend a hand without complaining or asking indiscreet questions, Simon is one of those people. Every time there’s trouble in sight, there’s trouble and scuffles, he’s more than he can, he gets angry. the sleeves, leave everything flat and reapply as dry.”
