After discussing the image of the mother last week with Marie Nimier (The Dark Side of the Queen), let’s move on to the eternal and universal subject of the novel, love. There too, not a writer has succumbed to it. Camille Laurens has made it a specialty throughout her fiction, In these arms, Love, novel, Nervous Romance, The One You Believeetc., just as she brilliantly invested in the writing of the self. With Your promise (Gallimard), the author mixes the two registers and mischievously plays with the concordances between her heroine and her own story.
Thus Claire Lancel, renowned novelist, lost a child and wrote about him, was harassed on social networks for having, pushed by her lover, taken down a playwright storyteller in her podcast and was sued by her ex-partner for having described moments of their intimate lives. We then remember Philip (1995), of the trial of the ex-husband – dismissed – of Camille Laurens concerning Love, noveland the controversy born in 2021 after academician Goncourt published an incendiary criticism in The World of Books on The Postcard, by Anne Berest, present on the Goncourt list as The Children of Cadillac of his companion François Noudelmann…
It begins as a romance, Claire, divorced, falls into the arms of the handsome Gilles, an expert in puppets, puppets and automatons, who enchants and seduces everyone around him. The couple swims in bliss, buys a “magical house” in Hyères, she promises him, at his request, never to write about him and Gilles, not to betray her; we wait patiently, because as Claire says, “in books, happiness tires everyone”. Cleverly, Camille Laurens sows clues. We soon learn that Claire is incarcerated and that Gilles is in a coma, while their respective friends speak up… This is how the puppeteer’s personality takes shape. We are dealing with a dangerous sociopath, devoid of any compassion, pulling the strings and using the mechanisms of every perverse: seduce, reduce, destroy. The demonstration of control is masterful, the narrative structure impeccable. Everyone has their own tricks…