One return chases the other. The booksellers had barely returned the boxes of novels from August before they had to unpack those from January. In addition to the events that are Gaspard Koenig (AquaL’Observatoire) and Pierre Lemaitre (The Beautiful PromisesCalmann-Lévy), here are five titles that should definitely make the news. Where it is notably a question of smartphones with Delphine de Vigan, the death penalty with Constance Debré and great cuisine with Gautier Battistella. At the table!
Delphine de Vigan, Nokia and me
The literary critic, still exhausted by a very self-centered September (dad, mom, me) can only express his gratitude to Delphine de Vigan. An anomaly among very popular French novelists, the author of No and me hates repeating yourself. If she had immense success with a book about her bipolar mother (Nothing stands in the way of the night), this admirer of Stephen King multiplies the fictions reflecting their era while varying the genres, up to the thriller (Based on a true story). To which we must add sensitive, introspective writing, but never cutesy.
After Children are kings (2021) on reality TV and social networks, I am Romane Monnier examines the place of smartphones in our lives. Single father, Thomas accidentally exchanges his phone with a stranger on a drunken Saturday night. Having access to the device’s code, he immerses himself in the digital existence of its owner, which seems to have evaporated. Who is Romane Monnier? Texts, voice messages, photos, videos, health data, dictaphone or applications are all elements of the investigation, and reveal a virtual portrait of this young woman uncomfortable with the pretenses of her time. Based on the principle that the truth of beings is now found more in their smartphone than in diaries or confessionals, Delphine de Vigan shows how, from the first Nokia (ah the snake of the game Snake !) to smartphones, our lives are becoming more and more confused with these omnipresent cuddly toys. Avoiding the pitfall of the technophobic pamphlet, I am Romane Monnier proves that WhatsApp is a beautiful romantic subject. In the war for attention, faced with the colonization of screens, literature has perhaps not said its last word. Thomas Mahler
I am Romane Monnier by Delphine de Vigan. Gallimard, 331 p., €22. Released January 15.
Eric Reinhardt, the man is a hermaphrodite like the others
Let’s make amends: in the past we were able to make fun of Eric Reinhardt, in whom we saw Narcissus as too sophisticated in his dressing and in his writing. With his new book, The Imperfecthe demonstrates a self-deprecation which cleanses him of his sins of pride. Furthermore, we can only forgive everything to a man who, page 211, pays homage to Fleetwood Mac and their song Dreams…
The Imperfect has to do, if not with dreams, with reverie. As part of the “My night at the museum” collection, Reinhardt decides to be locked up in the Borghese Gallery, next to the statue of theHermaphrodite. Sportswear is not an option in such circumstances: Reinhardt puts on a seventies Francesco Smalto suit with purple lining (“episcopal”, says the author). Thus dressed, the bishop of letters strolls through the Borghese Gallery, remembers former stays in Rome, digresses on Caravaggio, Bernini or the works stolen by Napoleon from his brother-in-law Camille Borghese – all while embedding in his story a fantastic tale featuring a hermaphrodite. This mixture of genres allows Reinhardt to reflect with originality, finesse and humor on contemporary debates on sexual identity and on his own androgyny – pages which would have interested other dandies, from Virginia Woolf to David Bowie. Reinhardt definitively turning his back on snobbery, he cites neither Orlando de Woolf Ziggy Stardust by Bowie, but praises… the album Play from Moby! We go from surprise to surprise in this book. Narrow-minded masculinists will throw away The Imperfect into the fire when Oscar Wilde fanatics, including us, can only salute the audacity of Reinhardt who, with this daring fantasy, offers himself a true literary redemption. Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld
The Imperfect par Eric Reinhardt. Stock, 264, 19,90 €.
Constance Debré, the last days of the condemned
The world is divided into three: those who understand nothing about Constance Debré’s books (and who deride her), those who love her for the wrong reasons and those who see in her a kind of postmodern mysticism. With her emaciated face and almost shaved head, she looks more and more like a monk. Impressionable minds see her as a disordered punkette while Sister Constance has something of a Cistercian character. Is it a coincidence that she cites Saint Paul (“To the pure all is pure”) in the opening words of her new book, Protocols ?
After starting, like Guillaume Dustan, with an autobiographical trilogy on the theme of self-reinvention (the essential Play Boy, Love Me Tender et Nom), Debré like Dustan began to explore other territories. In Protocolsshe looks at the application of the death penalty in the United States today. From the electric chair to injections to the firing squad, she details this barbarity which continues. With her dry and haughty humor, she notes: “The higher the security level, the more prisons resemble contemporary art spaces.” The design does not spare ignominy. When Constance Debré is not investigating behind the scenes of the prison environment, she wanders through Los Angeles, eats little and swims (2.5 kilometers every morning). This rule that she applies to her diet forges her slender silhouette as well as her style, always more ascetic. On a literary level, it is on another level that A Prisoner’s Diary by Sarkozy… We are somewhere between Bret Easton Ellis, Thomas Bernhard and Blaise Pascal. Few people will come out of this book dedicated to condemned prisoners alive, but Constance Debré is getting ever closer to grace. L.-H. L. R.
Protocols by Constance Debré. Flammarion, 138 p., 19 €.
Gautier Battistella, the Commander of the kitchen
In 2022, Gautier Battistella had enjoyed great bookstore success with Chefa mock thriller revolving around the suicide of Paul Renoir, an imaginary character reminiscent of the cooks Bernard Loiseau and Benoît Violier. Why make fiction when reality surpasses it? Former food critic at Guide MichelinBattistella is today writing the true novel of the life of Paul Bocuse, the Marie-Antoine Carême of Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or. A legend of the last century whose extraordinary destiny is perfectly restored here: youth on the banks of the Saône, the valiant commitment at the end of the Second World War, the first weapons in the kitchen, the three stars in the Michelinthe conquest of America and Japan, the meetings with Brigitte Bardot and General de Gaulle, Romain Gary and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (for whom he invented VGE black truffle soup), the resounding declarations and world fame, the resistance to successive fashions, from nouvelle cuisine to molecular cuisine…
There is food and drink in this Bocuse. The story, lively and lively, is devoured with the pleasure one takes in reading a press saga signed by a good journalist. But what to think of Bocuse himself? A willing megalomaniac, insatiable polygamist (three official women at the same time, plus passing mistresses), this big mouth who boasted of never opening a book was capable of beating up a member of his team for no reason. If his life is hectic, the portrait that emerges of this boor really does not make him likable. “There was no after Mozart, how do you expect there to be one after Bocuse? », said the cook, more than crazy, when he was alive. After his death, against all odds, the Earth continued to rotate. L.-H. L. R.
Bocuse by Gautier Battistella. Grasset, 313 p., 22 €.
Marie-Hélène Lafon, other tiny lives
No offense to the German-speaking literati, France is not reduced to the left bank and the right bank. Far from the Seine flows the Santoire. It was near her eternal river, in Cantal, that Marie-Hélène Lafon grew up. From Dog’s Evening (2001), this admirer of Cézanne has never stopped painting the peasant environment of her origins, meeting success with Stories (Goncourt short story prize 2016) and Son’s story (Renaudot Prize 2020). We know that it is by reading Tiny lives from Pierre Michon that Marie-Hélène Lafon had the revelation about her vocation. In truth, his stripped-down style is more reminiscent of his Corrèze cousins Pierre Bergounioux and Richard Millet than the sometimes elaborate lyricism of Michon, the Creuse writer. Hors champ extends a coherent work in which we always bathe in the same river – the least of things for the author of Sources.
Over a few decades, Hors champ tells the story of the crossed destinies of a brother and a sister, Gilles and Claire. Children of farmers, they are supposed to take over their parents’ farm – well, especially Gilles. Is Saint-Nectaire the future of man? While Claire leaves to build her life elsewhere, Gilles stays on the family land, near Aurillac and Saint-Flour, going as far as the Condat dairy to sell what he gets from his cows. A dull melancholy haunts this lost country where, when suicide is stronger than oneself, one hangs oneself in the barn. What was the best thing that Gilles and Claire would have had, one might ask, paraphrasing Flaubert, another of Marie-Hélène Lafon’s bedside authors. Images of the past, the grandfather’s tractor or the catechism of childhood, which come back to the memory of the two heroes and soften their present more than the common agricultural policy. L.-H. L. R.
Hors champ by Marie-Hélène Lafon. Buchet/Chastel, 170 p., 19,90 €.
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Worth a look
