Careful worksuch was the title of the first book published by Pierre Lemaitre in 2006 and this is how we could describe the third volume of his tetralogy THE Glorious years, A bright futurewhich is coming out these days. A novel that its publisher, Calmann-Lévy, has printed in 250,000 copies! Such a figure does not seem so presumptuous as the two previous volumes shattered records with 714,000 copies sold (all formats combined) for The Big World (2022) and 422,000 for Silence and Anger (2023).
In short, the Goncourt 2013 (Goodbye up there) has undoubtedly become the French master of the “popular soap opera”. Like a “little-footed Zola” (it’s his), he unfolds his vast 20th century fresco, with a cliffhanger to the other, leaving ample room for his imagination while respecting historical fundamentals, as evidenced by the long list of readings and various acknowledgments at the very end of his 588-page long novel. “I even went there,” he writes of Prague. A feat, it seems, for this hermit. This means…
Two major events affect the Pelletier family
It was in 1959, in Gaullist France and in the midst of the Cold War, that we found the Pelletier family. Jean the eldest always appears unloved and a husband under control (despite his murderous instincts) and his wife, Geneviève, an improbable shrew, addicted to her son Philippe and dangerous for her daughter Colette, entrusted to her grandparents , Agathe and Louis, returned from Beirut and settled in a vast residence in Plessis-sur-Marne. His brother, François, a brilliant journalist at Evening newspaper, the largest national daily, participates in the first TV news broadcast, copied from “5 columns on the front page”, highly restricted by those in power. While Hélène, their pregnant sister, inaugurates nighttime radio broadcasts in direct contact with listeners, flagship radio broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s.
Two major events affect the Pelletier family: the sexual assault of little Colette by a drunken peasant, the fat and fat Macagne; and Francis’ active participation in the exfiltration of a Czech spy in the service of France in the person of “Lutin”: whose real name is Todor Kozel, he is the head of the Translations office at the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose officer in charge at the General Directorate of French Intelligence is Georges Chastenet, about whom Lemaitre says he was inspired by Le Carré’s Smiley; a man with a heavy gait and big tortoiseshell glasses but a master spy.
The first event breaks our hearts, the second keeps us in suspense. Will Colette overcome her trauma? Will the journalist escape the clutches of the Prague police? Let us add to these trials some components of the Thirty Glorious Years, namely the joys of exponential consumption and the dangers of the nuclear arms race, and we will savor all the irony of the title A bright future.