All this has nothing to do with me, proclaimed the title of Monica Sabolo’s third book (JC Lattès, 2013). This was the conclusion reached by “XX” in the face of the grief into which the end of their brief idyll had plunged the (anti) heroine, a certain “MS” – idyll and grief that this autofictivo-conceptual text humorously dissected before to leave the reader’s heart in pieces, after a line revealing how this pain indeed had nothing to do with XX, and everything with MS’ trashed childhood.
“This has nothing to do with me”, That’s what Monica S., the narrator of The Clandestine Lifewhen, after listening to a podcast on the assassination of Georges Bessethe boss of Renault, by Direct Action, in 1986, she believes she has a subject that will allow her to write “an easy and spectacular trick”the “as far away as possible” from her. But, of course, many links (silence, violence, forgiveness requested or not…) appear, which unite the two stories. From the trial and error of Monica Sabolo in the footsteps of the terrorist group as in the footsteps of its past is born The Clandestine Lifea moving novel, with trembling beauty, towards which the author’s six previous books seemed to tend.
Investigation
All this has nothing to do with me produced the tiny traces of a love story (exchanged messages, stolen lighters, etc.) like so many pieces of evidence. Crans Montana et Summer (JC Lattès, 2015 and 2017) sought, decades later, to understand what had happened to young girls, and Eden (Gallimard, 2019) presented itself as a thriller. The Clandestine Life is for its part a real investigation, between acquisition of documentation on Direct Action (books of former police officers, old issues of Paris Match) and attempts to get in touch with its former members. Reflecting on this recurring recourse to an investigative form, Monica Sabolo begins by saying: “I like the idea of a quest for truth, a search for something big, ontological…” And, then, a little embarrassed by the big words, and because it is no less true, she continues: “I also love the idea of a null investigator”whose totemic figure would be the hero of Daimler s’en va, by Frédéric Berthet (Gallimard, 1988). In the dichotomy between the image of“ultra-efficiency” attached to the detectives and the hesitations displayed in her search by the narrator of The Clandestine Life lies a burlesque spring very much to his liking. Nonetheless, if “sentimental, emotional, shy, wobbly” whatever the Monica S. who investigates, she manages to meet actors and witnesses of the period and talk about them.
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