In a foreign country where he indulges in oblivion, a man is haunted by the silhouette of the woman who left him. Stuck in the depths of her distress, battered by a war that does not speak her name, a woman blames her husband for the erosion of her dreams. Elsewhere, a man obsessed with lips transforms his victims into muses. A young lover begins hypnosis sessions so that the reflection reflected in the mirror finally opens her eyes. Bewitched by the moon, an amateur astrologer loses touch with reality, and with those he loves.
In portable nightshis first collection of short stories, Louis Carmain (Guano, The offerings) turns love into a bewildering and haunting literary experience.
“Portable.Adj. Said of what can be transported easily. In a series of dense and complex universes – which could very well exist at home as elsewhere, in the real world as in that of dreams – the writer transposes what is most awkward, most luminous, more commonplace in each of us, pointing to what brings us together in the great adventure of humanity.
Louis Carmain recounts desire, passion, fallen ideals; those of phantom couples, impossible couples, stillborn couples, one-sided couples. Stories of couples, therefore, or rather of the idea that each person has of them and what this idea gives rise to in oneself; thoughts that squabble over attention, jostle reason, go beyond the limits, sometimes bordering on obsession.
Steeped in a disturbing strangeness, the six short stories seem to exist outside the world, as if they were part of the absurdity of dreams. It is in the interstices of the latter that he finds matter for stories. His stories emerge from the unsaid, from what could have been, from what should have been, from what dies little by little or cannot find the way to life, stuck in our impossibility to open ourselves up, to abandon ourselves completely to the other, suffocated by the incommunicability of our interior worlds.
From this emptiness that unites us, it gives birth to a reality, the one that we live – or that we imagine – together, and what it evokes of worrying, tormented, desperate in oneself. It tells what we lose there, what we seek there, what escapes us and, sometimes, in an almost elusive instant, what we gain there.
With his sober, but carnal pen, the writer exposes the limits, the beauties, the depressions and the strangeness of the body. Everything is imbued with a deadpan humor that allows him to build authentic characters, whose dignity threatens to run away at any moment. Even more than beings, he sketches, with his precise phrasing and his attention to detail, looks, cold sweats, racing hearts, sowing, here and there, suspicions of the universal.