This is the title that Brigitte Haentjens’ latest novel could bear, which here tells the story of the decrepitude of a man, a relationship, a couple. A life ?
Posted yesterday at 7:00 p.m.
There is nothing sexy about the man narrated here. From the first pages of Dark is the night, a sort of disenchantment novel, one wonders what the narrator is doing with him. Him, a kind of wreck, crushed in the sun, a mojito in hand, from 10 am.
In this book written in “you” (“you were soaked”), the woman who accompanies him looks brilliant, pretty, no doubt bruised. It smells like a toxic relationship.
It is precisely this story of a relationship as asymmetrical as it is devious that we are told over 225 pages, with short chapters alternating between present, past, and laconic reflections (of a shrink, of an inner voice, or straight from the reader?).
All the originality of the text rests here on its context. We are (at least in the past) in a bygone era, a Parisian setting, post-68, at the University of Vincennes (an experimental university dissolved in 1980, where you could come across Deleuze as well as Foucault, or Toni Negri) . She’s studying psychiatry, too. She admires everything about him. Him ? We don’t really know. Between the story of this mythical era (with its crowded libraries, its smoky cafes, and its fiery discussions), we can quietly guess the decline of the couple (from the first lies to the first bruises). In the background, a left fauna, growing caviar. Or whiskey, if that is said. Because yes, abuse also happens in the most cultured circles. Intellectuals are not spared. Dark is the night finally bears its name very well: dark is its reading too.
Dark is the night
Brigitte Haentjens
boreal
225 pages