So therefore, the Goncourt 2022 has been awarded to live fast by Brigitte Giraud. An intimate and personal novel that could have disqualified the one who had already written about the death of her husband, just after his accident twenty years ago. But in this novel which avoids tears to better point out remorse, we can also find excellent reasons for it to be given priority.
The first is anecdotal. Yes, the author is a woman, a woman who talks about her man. But that’s not the point and live fast is not a feminist novel. The second is time. The novel that freezes time at the very end of the 1990s. A very rock’n’roll atmosphere with multiple references to music and a tragic destiny that strikes its characters: a young couple who are about to settle in the house they just bought, she a novelist, he a rock critic broke on a motorbike.
The third is that it’s not a novel about mourning or resilience. Brigitte Giraud, who has already written about the death of her husband, in Now in 2001, never recovered, collecting on the contrary for twenty years all the “ifs” that could have prevented her accident. Even if it means accumulating all possible remorse.
Look for the meaning
This confrontation with the vagaries of life is what concerns us all. And if the author does not press too hard on the rope of guilt, she does not think less: “You know how necessary it is to attribute the fault. Even if it’s up to you. »
” live fastit’s a trip to the heart of what this capital word means: meaning, adds Marceline Bodierour contributing reader of the 20 Minutes Books platform, who enjoyed reading it. A man who kills himself on a motorbike on a road without difficulty, that doesn’t make sense! Unless we decipher this accident, by linking together, according to an implacable logic, everything that seemed to have no connection at the time: and “if I had not telephoned my mother”, and “if Stephen King died on Saturday, June 19, 1999”, and “if the free trade agreements between Japan and the European Union had not been signed”… we can go as far as we want, and it’s dizzying. »
Unaware of his own fate
Living fast is indeed a vertiginous novel, even if everything is in the aftermath… “It is only after the fact that we can interpret the most harmless choices as links in the chain that led to accident, emphasizes Marceline Bodier. After the fact, so once everything is over and nothing can be changed. One thinks of Raymond Aron, who said that “Men make history, but they don’t know the history they are making”: in the same way, on the simple scale of our daily life, we create our destiny, without know which one we manufacture. Brigitte Giraud proves that we can appropriate this chain of coincidences that we cannot control, that we can appropriate it after the fact, become one with it, make it our history and our identity. Because ultimately, if everything converges towards the question of the meaning of what is happening to us, then it is also towards this possibility: finally, closing a cycle and gaining acceptance. »