She stood out with The House, audacious autofiction recounting his happy passage in a Berlin brothel. Here she is back with misconducta logical continuation and variation on this same theme – more “auto” than “fictional”, moreover – sexuality, here unpriced and after the experience of motherhood.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
With her liberated pen and her always uninhibited reflections, let’s say that Emma Becker has not finished making people talk. To brew some, downright shock the others. Can one remain a woman by becoming a mother? Can one remain oneself in the desire of men? What if, finally, happiness meant “distracting oneself from monogamy through pleasure”?
Great questions posed from the outset, explored (literally: concretely) here on more than 300 pages, with a caustic lucidity. Certainly redundant at times, after a lover here, another there, a third elsewhere, Emma Becker concludes with as many fantasies as disappointments. Bitter, yes, but somehow revealing (emancipatory?). We won’t tell you more…
“The return of the scandalous Berlin”, titled Technikart, attributing to the story of this existential and sexual quest (because yes, it is a little, a lot, question of sex with Emma Becker, we will have understood) nothing of less than four stars. “And if men do not always come out of it grown, literature, it finds its account. »
And it’s a fact: if she does talk a lot about cocks and doesn’t skimp on descriptions (because “everything is fixed with a pipe”, as she says), Emma Becker handles the pen with ease and rigor. manifestos.
She is a woman of letters and it shows. As proof: “give me a minute, the time to hunt husband and children”, she wrote to us, quite naturally, a few moments before our interview, last week. No doubt, she is capable of being as vulgar as she is literary. Both orally and in writing.
Of course, the disappointment
Believe it or not, this book was originally supposed to be about Emma Becker’s “crazy love” for her son, she tells us. Surprise, since if it is the backdrop, let’s say that there is very little question of little Isidore here. Rather: of her adventures that she puts on in detail, of all these pleasures and other coitus that she fantasizes, these loves that she invents, and from which she is so disillusioned. Before starting all over again, in someone else’s arms, car or bed. Or the next one. Constantly and so on.
Why, exactly? And what exactly is she running from? His partner ? His life ? Life ?
When I realized how we conceive of motherhood, how much everything rests on the shoulders of the mother, I was so frustrated!
Emma Becker
The author fully assumes the autofictional side of the text, and its “self-writing”. His many pranks do not therefore embody an escape from either the father or the patriarchy (“I would like to, I realize to what extent I am a slave to the gaze of men, that’s always what I come back to, because I know!”), but rather simply an escape of time. “An escape from time that never stops passing! »
And the title evokes a bit of that. To flee, she deviates from the right path of the good mother, what.
But not only her. All these men she meets and straddles deviate just as much from the behavior that she fantasizes about them. Obviously: “They can’t be up to it,” she explains. You can’t expect people to reach the proportion you give them. […] Inevitably, reality makes us return to the banality of life, and its mediocrity. »
Hence the interest of fiction, we understand.
Speaking of mediocrity, it is impossible to ignore his disappointment (disillusion?) in the face of penetration, at the heart of the novel and here dissected in abundance. “Is that it?” “says the author, in whom desire is ultimately only” theater and illusions “. “But where are the repeated orgasms? […] Misconduct, that’s it: this moment when I realize that everything we’ve been sold is shit! »
That’s why she writes. “What protects me from boredom or depression, she concludes, is writing…”
misconduct
Emma Becker
Albin Michael
365 pages