At the age of 25, the brilliant comedian in the image of eternal teenager Panayotis Pascot quickly became a well-known television personality in France. His chronicles on the popular Yann Barthès set for The small newspaper on the Canal+ channel and then on Daily on TMC caused a sensation. In 2019, he took to the stage with his stage show called Almost, now accessible on the Netflix platform. But behind the (melancholy?) clown, we discover a damn good writer. Here he gives us a literary gem, intelligent, as cruel and luminous as a black diamond in which he returns to his Oedipal links with his father, but also his complicated relationship with sexuality and desire.
This existential crisis wrapped in a chaotic passage to adulthood is narrated in a stripped-down style where each sentence seems worth its weight in gold. The flayed narrator speaks of his ambivalent relationship made of thwarted love and heartbreaking hatred for a sick father who announces to his loved ones that he does not have much longer to live on this Earth. “It’s the story of someone who wants to kill. You, or the father, ultimately it comes down to the same thing,” says Pascot at the turn of a page. The author settles accounts with his father while grieving, without fuss, without pathos, calling on us as witnesses, we readers, but also the members of his family made up of siblings of six children, “six failures of the heart,” he emphasizes.
Even if the words are sometimes crude, the tone is nevertheless modest. Nothing is ever gratuitously crude or vulgar. By questioning what it means to be a man, the author fights an internal battle against toxic virility and the so-called place of the male in a heteronormative society. His testimony is visceral. He talks about his disappointed love affairs with the girls he frequents in a sort of denial that is as bitter as it is destructive.
He also returns to the relationships with two of his lovers whom he names with infinite tenderness Life and Happiness. We are here in the order of frank emotions with this story-confession in the form of a diary which addresses wounds linked to each other like an inextricable way of the cross: serious depression, suicidal thoughts and above all the slow and painful acceptance of his homosexuality which he will take time to accept without finding it “ridiculous”, only natural. It was during a stay in Montreal, one winter evening, that he decided to fully embrace his attraction to boys. Sincere and vulnerable, the narrator gives himself body and soul. “I feel a rage within me, a creator, that will never die,” he sums up. Much more than courage – it still takes some to dig so deep into the dark and dangerous areas of the bruised psyche – the young writer demonstrates strong maturity. Panayotis Pascot confronts the void with an astonishing poetic breath.