Jean-Simon DesRochers (The hourglass of loneliness) is used to stories where he intersects dozens of lives. He raises his art several notches with The world will fall back on you, where he portrays more than a hundred characters in a skilful and touching novel that takes up less than 250 pages.
His novel, made up of three “sets” of short stories that take place over a period of three months, has traveled around the world three times. Its narrative structure evokes the relay race: we first meet Noémie, a performer undermined by a recent separation, before following her daughter Clio, who is leading her a trench warfare, then one of her classmates, their teacher , And so on.
The slices of life are linked to each other, linked by intimate contacts or chance encounters, air travel, intercontinental communications, etc. There are characters you only meet once, others who come back, and the writer always only needs four or five pages to draw up a summary of the life of each of them, whether it’s a bored Finnish hockey player in Montreal or a Chinese saleswoman who secretly likes women.
In the background, attacks perpetrated by a terrorist group determined to cause an awakening of conscience add a touch of suspense, until it is discovered that one of the characters will be recruited to blow up a bomb during a conference in Montreal. And that the explosion will affect other lives that we encountered in the novel.
On the narrative level, The world will fall back on you is a tour de force. Which finds its meaning in the writer’s empathy for these lives made up of badly hidden fragilities, loneliness, small pleasures and as many cowardices which make up an astonishing radiography of the world and a human mosaic where, basically, each seeks only a little warmth to put itself in the heart.
The world will fall back on you
Jean-Simon DesRochers
Boreal Editions
256p.