Offenses
By Constance Debre.
Flammarion, 122 pages, €17.50.
The rating of L’Express: 4/5
Offenses By Constance Debré.
© / flammarion
Constance Debré divides even more than Annie Ernaux: the “left” idolizes her and the “right” rejects her. Why ? Mainly for cases of prejudice. Seduced by her photogenic Jean Genet look, some would like to make her a gay icon, a post-Despentes neo-feminist. Confused by the radical positions taken by this granddaughter of a Gaullist baron, others see her as an infrequent renegade. In truth, Debré escapes these simplistic classifications: behind his shaved head hides an elite writer that everyone should read.
After being unveiled in a thundering autobiographical trilogy (play boy, Love Me Tender and Last name), the former lawyer tries her hand at fiction: Offenses recounts the trial of a young man from the suburbs accused of the murder of an octogenarian. A banal story that turns to drama: having to pay a debt of hash, the boy intends to steal the credit card from the old lady, but she defends herself, and stabs her ten times. Not being an ordinary novelist, Debré sets up a device which may surprise you at first: the narrator is in turn the assassin and a voice that we imagine to be Debré but which could just as well be God – on the hundred pages count Offenses, there are about ten religious references. The central thesis is a reversal: in our falsified world, people who believe themselves on the side of Good would only be so thanks to the sacrifice of those who are considered to be on the side of Evil.
Debré does not preach with the incantations of a prophet, but in an ultra-dry style, more to the bone than ever – this is the thought of Bossuet in the language of Thomas Bernhard. Debré began in the wake of Hervé Guibert, it continues its work in the filiation of Blaise Pascal: astonishing evolution! As for the courthouses, don’t talk to him about it anymore: “Nothing has changed since Joan of Arc. Always the same masquerade, the same disguises, the same dirty mass.” Let those who have never read Constance Debré therefore stop condemning her without proof. Opening one of her books is enough to pardon her.