Last week before the presentation of the Goncourt prize, on November 3.
Like last year, you will be able to designate the Goncourt prize for readers of "20 Minutes".
Among the four finalists, "Vivre vite" by Brigitte Giraud was published on August 24, 2022 by Éditions Flammarion.
Marceline Bodier, bookstagramer and contributor to the 20 Minutes Books reading group, recommends
Vivre vite
by Brigitte Giraud.
His favorite quote:
I knew, intuitively I knew, but I wanted to be sure, I wanted someone to tell me that he had been waiting for me.
Why this book?
Because it's a journey to the heart of what this capital word means: meaning.
A man who kills himself on a motorbike on a road without difficulty, that doesn't make sense!
Unless...unless we decipher it after the fact, linking together according to an implacable logic everything that seemed to have no connection at the time: and "if I hadn't called my mother" , and "if Stephen King had 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 is dizzying.
Because it's dizzying, but it's all in the aftermath...
no need to try to do the exercise with our lives: it's only afterwards that we can interpret the most innocuous choices as links of the chain that led to the accident.
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.
Because Brigitte Giraud could have reacted by seeking to punish the culprits.
Her husband usually drove a Suzuki, and he died the day he borrowed a Honda: now we learn that the first was the choice of a good family man, while the second was, in his own words, two days before the accident, "a bomb not to be touched".
She investigates and realizes that this motorcycle had the reputation of being dangerous.
Only here… “You know how necessary it is to attribute the fault.
Even if it's up to you.
»
Because it is also an exploration of the way in which our time
permeates all our choices: in 1999, no cell phone with which it would have been so simple, today, to send the SMS which would have stopped everything... in 1999, no pressure for a man to take shelter behind an agenda on the verge of burnout to avoid picking up his son from school... in 1999, a young couple on the rise in society inevitably followed the gentrification movement that led him to buy a house with a garage in the city center… Brigitte Giraud brings Claude back to life, and a whole era with him.
Because you will have understood it, Brigitte Giraud opens 17 breaches
in time, in which any other world among the 131,072 possible could have engulfed if we combine all these possible bifurcations.
Of these 131,072 worlds, we know that in one, Claude died of a motorcycle accident on June 22, 1999: it is ours.
And if we had been in any of the other 131,071…it wouldn't have happened.
At least not in this way, because what do we know about these other worlds?
Would Claude have survived there, who would have followed him in his disastrous destiny?
It's endless...
Because yes, it is endless: there are many more than 17 decisive bifurcations
in the sum of our lives.
On the other hand, there is one certainty: this chain of coincidences that we cannot control, 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.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
The end has already been written since 1999: Brigitte Giraud's husband died in a motorcycle accident on June 22, 1999. Already written, but when was she certain?
We never found a cause for the accident: what if there was one in the tiny gears that preceded it?
Characters.
The book centers on a missing man and dissects everything that led to his death.
However, we have the feeling of meeting him very much alive: slim silhouette in perfecto, musician and biker, father close to his son, “mixture of sweetness and casualness”… this book is him.
Places.
The accident took place in Lyon: we know exactly at what red light.
But the text takes us from Claude's native Algeria to the canuts district of Lyon, passing through the ZUP where he and Brigitte Giraud grew up.
Always with the motorcycle, a symbol as much of freedom "on the road" as of death.
The time.
Live fast?
Living from 1958 to 1999, leaving Algeria in 1962, taking his freedom in the 1970s, settling down in the 1980s, being a father in the 1990s, dying young before the year 2000… Living fast, but not leave this world without leaving an ever-burning mark in 2022.
The author.
When Brigitte Giraud's husband died, she was returning from the press service signing of her second novel.
Her life as an author has branched off, and
Living Fast
is the second novel that evokes the accident, after Now in 2001. Between the two, a rich career crowned with several prizes.
This book was read with
the desire to hold back time, me too, letting myself go to the nostalgia of the rock years chronicled by Claude, the husband of Brigitte Giraud.
And thanks to them, increase the nostalgia by discovering on YouTube Live fast, love hard, die young by Faron Young.
What if we listen to him?
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