“Name”, by Constance Debré, Flammarion, 176 p., €19, digital €14.
If we read Constance Debré’s new novel blind, name, we would feel the benevolent empathy that we have in front of a rebellious teenager. But as her surname takes up a lot of space, we know that she is 50 years old, we have read her two previous novels, Play boy (Stock, 2018) and Love me tender (Flammarion, 2020), who recount not without power her late coming out, her breakup with an odious husband, the loss of custody of her son, the abandonment of her profession as a lawyer. This stripping has its individual greatness, but when it is delivered as an unprecedented lesson in life, we just want to say: “Go to your room and read your classics again. »
name is full of peremptory assertions whose opposite is just as true, of hostile injunctions (“Shut up”, “get out”). We no longer count the ” we do not care “ (of the dough, of the poor, of the class struggle), the ” It’s no use (respect, justice, family) ” it does not matter “ (childhood, Barthes and his « mouche enculages », the books that must all be thrown away). Because literature is her. She proposes to be an example, ” the hero “ nihilist the world needs. “I was born to finish a dirty job, I say dirty but I think beautiful, a beautiful job, the fairest, the most moral, I insist, the most moral, that of destroying, of finishing. But, conversely, she claims to “save[er] the sense of the world with [sa] life” or embody “a form of modernity” against “the bourgeois who speak to the bourgeois”. But who, in 2022, is still amazed by the refusal of standards and the desire to « to sweep » ? Who, if not the bourgeois young and old? She looks like an uneducated and humorless teenager who claims to have invented hot water in an ocean of lukewarm water.
Even in contradiction, Constance Debré lives in each of her sentences from which she immediately leaves to cross the next one – each comma is a door through which to escape.
More painful is her demagoguery, for example when she tells a 13-year-old boy addicted to the PlayStation that to cut himself off from everything in order to play day and night is “like writing books”, “people like us are the ones who make the world”. And advocate “adventure” when you know so many friends and institutions willing to host you (currently, the author is at the Villa Albertine, in New York) is it not a “obscenity” – word dear to the author? She makes her title sound like a refusal to belong: ” My name is Nobody “ (for Odysseus, it’s a hero’s ruse – and for her?), “say yes or no, that’s all” is his manly motto, but the only “no” in the book is grotesque. The former student of the Lycée Henri IV notes in fact: “When they called me after the baccalaureate to offer me to go to hypokhâgne, I said no thank you. »
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