We admire the brilliant moment in which a man rises from his ashes to launch himself into the flight of his overflowing imagination. The conviction towards that encounter with the meaning of life has the justification of the epic. Even more so when the baggage of defeats piles up on one like the worst of the anthological heroes.
What he tells us here Yannick Haenel has some of Quijote reincarnated in Ignatius reilly and finally in good old Jean. Because each time has its epics to the same extent as its absurd part. The cocktail is served with a bitter touch. Because between the pleasant sips of the great myths and the drinks of the most prosaic reality, without a hint of lyricism towards self-improvement, drunkenness ends up awakening strong hangovers.
Jean, the hero of this unique epic, is forty-nine years old, lives cloistered in a twenty-square-meter studio and spends his days watching movies while getting drunk. But despite his apparent carelessness and abandonment, he has written a monumental script about the life of Herman Melville that only Michael Cimino, the cursed director of The Hunter, could take to the cinema.
So in order to meet him, he embarks on an amazing search, that of the truth that shines between cinema and literature, which will lead him on a series of adventures as comical as they are extravagant between Paris, New York, Colmar and a lake in Italy. . The sparkling novel of a writer who lives literature and poetizes life.
You can now buy the novel "That the crown is not removed", by Yannick Haenel, here:
