His novels are not easy to access. However, when we delve into it, we find ourselves a universe built by a dry, elegant, precise style. I was waiting to find dear Luc Lang after having been edified by his novel The temptation (2019), Prix Médicis, which gave me my first experience of a western in literature. He returns, always with controlled violence, offering his readers The story of the fight (2023). His usually sober writing gives way, this time, to a sobriety open to a certain lyricism. This is evidenced by the first pages of the story where the author returns to a beach scene during his childhood. There he discovers, under the hot sun at the edge of cool water, the muscular and powerful body of the man who little by little becomes his father, the judoka Robert. We believe we are facing the sensuality of Wedding (1936) by Albert Camus. Never managing to inherit his father-in-law’s practice of judo, young Luc nevertheless embraced martial arts through karate, which he still practices today. In this novel, he dives back into his life without making the work a testimony. He wants his story to remain a novel, although the basis for it remains his struggles. The struggles of the life of a novelist, of a karateka, of a man who experienced many falls, from which he always managed to recover, inviting us to nourish ourselves with the same strength. Between two lessons on the fascinating history of Japanese martial arts, Luc Lang cannot help but take stock of the fights of his creation. What did he do with his life? And what do we do with ours? The fight is on. “Do work? The question could be asked in less bombastic terms. When one morning, shortly before dawn, undoubtedly escaping from a nightmare, I woke up with a start, already up in bed like a dead man rising from the tomb, with this interrogative sentence on my lips which twisted my brain: What what have you done with your life? »
2024-04-11 22:02:03
#struggles #novelists #life
