Spinning
By Arnaud Sagnard.
Stock, 200 pages, €19.50.
Express rating: 4/5
Spinning By Arnaud Sagnard.
© / Stock
Journalist Arnaud Sagnard is crazy about Los Angeles – and its basketball team, the Lakers. No surprise, therefore, if his second novel is set in the city of Philip Marlowe and Kobe Bryant. Anonymous among anonymous, its hero, Daniel Stein, drives buses through the City of Angels. A model employee, this sixty-year-old finds himself demoted by his management to a nocturnal line, in other words the court of miracles. In reality, Daniel serves as a guinea pig for a stress testing intended to check whether the local RATP is able to gain in “flexibility”. What is worth to him to be, discreetly, followed one whole week by an insurance agent. After having carefully missed his existence, will the old divorced driver succeed in his exit?
Arnaud Sagnard signs a fake thriller and a real existential novel, as fine in the psychological descriptions as in those of a megalopolis which, by dint of expanding, risks breaking up into blocks like an ice floe. A cultural chronicler, the author embellishes his spinning mill with classy references, starting with Insurance on death, the result of a stormy collaboration between two geniuses, Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. But the reader will also know more about the philosophy according to Bruce Lee, and will discover the hoarse voice of Bobby Cole, a failed Sinatra. Apart from the very un-American expression “eating the priest”, everything rings true in this melancholic Angeline trip. Thomas Mahler
Thelma
By Caroline Bouffault.
Runaway, 256 p., €20.
The rating of L’Express: 3/5
Thelma By Caroline Bouffault.
© / Fugue
When reading this strong and unvarnished first novel (published by the brand new publishing house Fugue), one spontaneously thinks of that of Delphine de Vigan, days without hunger, published in 2001. More than twenty years apart, the theme of anorexia nervosa thus continues to appear in literature, even if the autobiographical vein shows through less under the pen of Caroline Bouffault. She tells the daily life of Thelma Gardel, 15 and a half years old, from February to July. In second class in a residential suburb, this excellent student is 1.73 meters tall and weighs only 41 kilos. His weight obsesses him, swallowing the slightest food horrifies him.
It’s because a small voice constantly calls her to order, that of the “Coach”; an imaginary despot who “has taken over the controls” of her brain, has ruled her life for eighteen months and whom she does not want to disappoint – two hours of rugby, 16 kilometers of jogging, a skipped dinner, nothing to complain about . Thelma now looks like a “living sculpture of Giacometti”, arousing the incomprehension of her 6-year-old little sister, and the dismay of her parents (mother managing a furniture company, father math teacher in preparatory classes): why their eldest, intelligent, sociable, having never suffered any violence, has she been overtaken by “the hurricane of anorexia”? The author shakes up received ideas with her tough, stubborn heroine, whose loved ones never veil their faces although they bear the brunt of her illness. Caroline Bouffault scrutinizes the ravages of sober, fair writing, not without humour, and paints with empathy the portrait of a teenager at a crossroads. Delphine Peras
Mechanic
By Mattia Filice.
POL, 368 pages, €22.
The rating of L’Express: 3/4
Mechanical By Mattia Filice.
© / POL
In the past, we nicknamed them the barons of the rail, between them, they are called the mechanics, for us, they are the train drivers. One of them now takes up the pen to narrate his world of iron which, thanks to the chosen form – mostly free verse – is transformed into an epic universe. Mechanicis the title of this first novel, little brother of the At the line of the food worker Joseph Ponthus, who caused a sensation when he left in 2019. In eighteen years of driving, Mattia Filice has accumulated hundreds of thousands of kilometers and many anecdotes, enough to fuel the machine to dream.
Like his narrator, the author, then “projectionist of a cinema without spectators”, had nothing of a railroader when, thinking of becoming a railway worker, he knocked on the doors of recruiters. The formation will be a long Way of the Cross. And then came the Holy Grail, the cockpit. Man “takes himself for God”. “Master of chance”, he governs the destiny of thousands of travelers, which also brings many nightmares: falling asleep, derailments, “operational incidents”, erratic junctions, labyrinthine sorting, collusion with a boar… The lines fluctuate , but the friends are there (in particular Geoffrey, the essential black cat, “umbrella for the other Mechanics”), each with his “loc” (locomotive), all members of the same world governed by the eye of the KVB (control of speed per beacon). We sometimes get lost in the technical and pictorial language of this kingdom carrying its laws and its codes, its legends and its heroes, but it doesn’t matter, voluntary passengers, we are not, for once, in a hurry to see the terminus dawn. PM