It is a strong first novel that hits the bullseye, where it hurts, that Alex Viens offers us with Penances.
Posted at 5:00 p.m.
Can we ever mend the family relationships that broke us? For Jules, the protagonist of Penances, the question is not rhetorical. It’s inscribed in his flesh like a wound that only needs a little pressure to reopen, gaping, pustular.
Alex Viens, who made a name for himself with his defunct YouTube channel Grand-mère grunge, offers an anxiety-provoking behind closed doors with this gut-wrenching first novel. Jules arrives at her father, Denis, an old punk with whom she has cut ties, armed with a mysterious little box to give him. Despite her reluctance, she gets caught in the cracks of her father, who urges her to stay, locking the door – from the inside – behind him. Tongues are loosened, father and daughter raise each other warily, but a certain complicity settles in their repartee acid like bile, like an old song from The Cure that we know by heart and that we start in spite of ourselves. What if redemption was possible?
Little by little, Viens instills an increasingly oppressive malaise, a terrifying power struggle between father and daughter that can only end badly. We dive into the memories of Jules, weave the thread of a childhood shattered by an angry and manipulative father, ready to do anything to keep his daughters under his eternal yoke, while in the prison apartment, a mental and physical struggle s settles between the two protagonists, both victim and executioner of each other. By diving back into her past, by doing an autopsy of her life, will Jules be able to get rid of this guilt of which she has made a standard bearer, like an old coat? “Jules has a talent for the words she speaks to herself. One by one, she pins them in her collection. A cloud of tragic butterflies that she catalogs patiently, one by one, to find the one who would finally explain the origin of all that is wrong. And it’s always the same: Jules. »
Between raw writing driven by a life contaminated by violence and misery, and colorful passages imbued with a moving fragility, Alex Viens makes an eloquent, but not at all didactic, demonstration of these issues. We thus underline the extent to which the deep roots of unhealthy relations of domination grip people’s minds like nightmares from which it is difficult to extricate themselves. And it’s impossible to look away until the final, cathartic, chilling scene.
Penances
Alex Come
The August Horse
144 pages