“Name”, of Constance Debré: literary soap opera of Camille Laurens

If we read blindly the new Roman of Constance Debré, name, one would have the benevolent empathy that we have in front of a rebel teenager. But as his surname takes a lot of room, we know she is 50 years old, we read his previous two novels, Play Boy (Stock, 2018) and Love Me Tender (Flammarion, 2020), who tell not without power his coming Out late, his break with an odious husband, the loss of his son’s custody, the abandonment of his profession of lawyers. This counting has its individual size, but when he is assanted as an unprecedented lesson, we just want to say, “File in your room and connect your classics.”

Name is full of peremptory affirmations whose opposite is just as true, hostile injunctions (“shut up”, “pull yourself”). We do not count the “we do not care” (from the Pognon, the poor, the class struggle), the “it is useless” (respect, justice, the family) the “it has Not important “(childhood, barthes and his” fly hits “, the books that all have to throw). Because literature, it’s it. It proposes to be an example, “the hero” nihilist whose world needs. “I was born to finish a dirty job, I say dirty but I think beautiful, a nice job, the most just, the most moral, I insist, the most moral, that of destroying, to finish.” But, to the Inverse, she claims “save [er] the sense of the world with [her] life” or incarnate “a form of modernity” against “the bourgeois who speak to the bourgeois”. But who, in 2022, is still spurious by the refusal of the standards and the desire to “strike”? Who, if not the bourgeois young and old? It looks like an incultive and humorous teen who claims having invented hot water in an ocean of warm water.

More painful, his demagogy, so when she says to a 13-year-old boy with the Playstation that cut everything to play night and day, it’s “like writing books”, “people like us Are those who make the world “. And advocate “the adventure” when we know so many friends and institutions ready to accommodate (currently the lattice is at Villa Albertine, in New York) is not an “obscenity” – word expensive to the lattice? She makes her title ring as a refusal to belong to: “My name is nobody” (for Ulysses, it’s a cunning hero – and for her?), “Say yes or no, that’s all” is his motto virile but the only “no” of the book is grotesque. The ex-high school student Henry IV notes: “When they called me after the bac to offer me to go to Hypokhâgne, I said no thanks.”

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/Media reports.