An original idea, conducted with the appropriate pen, can turn a book into a literary fortune, a kind of predestination to offer a fun, entertaining work, brimming with humor. But at the same time, this book is filled with interesting perspectives on life, love and all those little things that we look for in our daily lives. Marie Sabine Roger, gets it.
Although luckily that of the protagonist of this story, Mortimer Di Funto. A guy whose fate is guessed even in his ill-fated name. Mortimer had written in his genes that he should die at 36, like all his ancestors.
In his three-plus decades of waiting, Mortimer Di Funto has done little with his life. Waiting for that end has had him delivered to him, with no other motivation. No family, no great loves or passions.
And his birthday arrives, and nothing happens, the next day he dawns without death having stopped in him. End of the curse? A whole life wasted? Could there be a more ghoulish joke?
Mortimer, who has only seen his life go by, suddenly finds himself with the sketch of a free life, and little by little he insists on making something positive of it. He has lost precious time that he will never get back, but deep down, starting the day after his 36th birthday, he may be more alive than anyone else. Starting a new life for him becomes a value that raises him above other more sluggish lives, more subordinate to the everyday as a fatal routine.
Undoubtedly, this is a work with large doses of humor but with an important existential residue of positive energy. The notion, so often commented, of the discovery of what is truly important leads us together with Mortimer on a path of vital rediscovery, without morals or indoctrination, or self-help, only through humor, possibly together with love, of the few authentic things that we have left.
You can buy the book Damn birthday, the latest novel by Marie-Sabine Roger, here: