There are more singular flashes in current French narrative than those offered by David Foenkinos. It will be a thing that generation X always has something interesting to contribute as the last generation germinated in the analogical and delivered to the imagination of their own harvest, without mediations made in displays.
Because Nicolas Mathieu came out of nowhere in 2018, overwhelming all that "caterage" of expectant writers before a grand prize in which they have participated, taking the Goncourt with him no less. Unexpected trophy for the sworn round bookmakers on duty.
The writer made after the most widespread popular recognition. The same one who later has to return to the shadows of solitude in front of the white folio. After his award, Nicolas Mathieu begins to take his steps as a recognized author. And his prose is taking greater flights thanks to the accolade that encourages him to continue in the thirteen of writing and telling the world...
Top recommended novels by Nicolas Mathieu
their children after them
Each country has its idiosyncrasies and problems. France observes its navel thanks to visions like the one that Nicolas Mathieu gives us in this novel. We do not go back to great dates marked in red, the chronicles already point to them. It is about seeing a very recognizable panorama for those of us who inhabit childhoods, adolescence and youth of the 90s loaded with a notion between nihilistic, hedonistic and rebellious in the face of happiness taken for granted and splendid futures questioned by a youthful intuition in the face of farce .
What remains then is the most real, the discoveries of a last generation exposed to everything without the Internet or digital revolutions. Perhaps the last generation of the authentic. Probably the moment in which the most inconsequential blank pages of the History in which we find ourselves now began to be written.
August 1992 in the east of France: a forgotten valley, extinguished blast furnaces, a lake and the heat of the afternoon. Anthony is fourteen years old and, out of sheer boredom, he ends up stealing, along with his cousin, a canoe to browse the famous nudist beach on the opposite shore.
There, what awaits him is his first love, his first summer, the one that marks everything that will happen to him later. Thus begins in the drama of life. This book is the novel of a valley, of an era and of adolescence; It is the political story of a youth that has to find its own way in a dying world.
Four summers, four moments, from "Smells like teen spirit" to the 1998 World Cup, to recount lives that go by at full speed in that intermediate France, that of medium-sized cities and residential areas, between rural isolation and polygon concrete.
The France of Johnny Hallyday, that of the towns that have fun on fairground attractions and face each other in television quizzes; that of the men who are consumed in the pit and the women in love who wither at the age of twenty. A country in the rearguard of globalization, caught between nostalgia and decline, decency and rage.
Connemara
Any adjustment with the past ends up leading to an exorcism of the present. Because there are always vestiges of alienation, of a void that finds perfect accommodation in the borders of the middle decades of life. yes you will know Dante Alighieri...
There are no crossed lives, but coincidental crossroads where all kinds of travelers longing for some path that no one has made known to them or that they have found in a travel guide end up. In the dilemmas, uncertainties grow, but also new motivations that give some sense to the path to be taken towards nowhere.
Hélène is about to turn forty. She comes from a small town in eastern France. She has had a good academic and professional career, has two daughters and lives in a designer house in uptown Nancy. She has reached the goal that the magazines mark and the dream that she had in her adolescence: get away, change her social environment, succeed. And, even so, there is that feeling of failure, after the years, that everything is a disappointment.
Christophe, for his part, has just fulfilled them. He has never left the town where he and Hélène grew up. He is no longer as handsome as before. He goes through life step by step, giving priority to friends and fun, leaving for the next day the great efforts, the important decisions and the age of choosing what he wants. He now sells dog food, dreams of playing hockey again like when he was sixteen, and lives with his father and his son, an unassuming, quiet, indecisive existence. It could be said that he has completely failed. And yet he is convinced that there is still time to do anything.
Connemara is the story of a return to the place of origin, of a relationship, of two people who try again in a France in full transformation. It is, above all, a story about those who settle accounts with their illusions and their youth, about a second chance and a love that looks for itself, despite the distances, in a country that sings to Sardou and votes against itself. .
