You can be a great writer and a decent columnist. It was never too late compiles monthly articles written by Lola Lafon for the daily newspaper Release between 2022 and 2024, to which the author of the formidable The little communist who never smiled And When you listen to this song added more intimate texts. Israeli-Palestinian conflict, pension reform, Mazan rape trial, death of Nahel… The novelist intends to express her astonishment, her revolts or her helplessness in the face of inevitably tragic news. “No doubt we should have dared to admit that we were broken by too many atrocious images. No doubt it would be better to concede: words fail us, we do not know what to do with what we see, what we read” , she writes.
Alas, the clichés did not fail him. In Lola Lafon, capitalism is obviously “morbid”, the violence always of police origin, the zeitgeist “liberal”, “manage”, a dirty word. According to her, current policies associate “social contempt” with “neoliberal brutalities”, while “individuals come after markets”.
Would we dare to recall that in our awful capitalist country, social spending represents a third of GDP? The spring demonstrations against pension reform are enthusiastically described as a “poetic political upsurge”. Obviously, the figures for the pension deficit or the public debt represent too prosaic a subject for a French writer.
Fortunately, there remain some beautiful passages, like this magnificent text written at the time of the death of the singer Sinéad O’Connor, who did not hesitate to jeopardize her career to denounce sexual abuse within the Catholic Church.
Telerama celebrated a “captivating” work. For France Télévisions, Lola Lafon “crunches the veneer of our contemporary mythologies”. Strangely, even The Pointalthough classified on the right, praised a “saving” text. If there is a bastion that valiantly resists the neoliberal dictatorship, it is our literary world.
It was never too lateby Lola Lafon. Stock, 226 p., €19.50.