In a no man’s land with blurred borders reminiscent of Central Asia, a few seconds before being burned by the flames of a napalm cloud, a soldier tells his story while remaining in “the paradoxical nothingness of fire” .
Victim, he believes, of a coalition “of killers and killer nations and supporters of ethnic cleansing without borders”, this singular narrator relives episodes from his childhood and reviews members of his family. As a way to travel one last time. The ardent project of Sam, the instant narrator: “Say everything, invent everything, not panic in the face of the unspeakable. »
He is sometimes thirty-three years old, sometimes eight years old, he is both here and there. Fortunately for us, the “count of seconds and minutes has no relation when comparing time outside the fire and inside the fire.”
Like his grandfather before him, his destiny was to “live in the fire,” he was often told. He received special training for this. Living in fire? It is both, we understand, a metaphor and a burning state. “It’s settling somewhere else. It means leaving everything you know and accepting something else. »
Emerging from his story are some unique female figures from his own clan – the men are often at war, dead or in prison – who play the role of initiators for Sam, in sexuality or in the mastery of fire. Women who have fled a stifling family and patriarchal environment. Like her aunt Masheed, who seeks to draw her into “big banditry”, or like aunt Yoanna and her collection of homunculi, replicas of men in flesh and blood measuring around ten centimeters which she keeps in vivariums.
Living in the fire, the twenty-second and last book signed by the name of Antoine Volodine, closes the long chapter of a work as original as it is monumental. Volodine is the main pseudonym of Jean Desvignes, a French writer born in 1950 who also signed several books under the names of Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger or Elli Kronauer.
Under this name, we owe him in particular The inner harbor (Midnight, 1996), Minor angels (Seuil, 1999, Wepler prize) and Radiant Terminus (Seuil, 2014, Médicis prize). Some milestones in a work of invention crossed by secret organizations, uncertain escapes, enigmatic figures, living ghosts.
Stories where the characters often evolve in a setting of steppes and virgin forests, through the ruins of collapsed empires, driven by wandering and the hope of a distant horizon, the memory of “the world as it was.” “it was before the final conflagration and the destruction of almost everything and almost everyone”.
A unique and colorful universe, without equal, that Antoine Volodine himself described as “post-exoticism”, mixing science fiction, shamanism, fantastic folklore and the excess of 20th century history.e century. With, here, a good dose of Tibetan mythology, with horses, yurts, corpses offered to vultures, meat from “greasy sheep”, dresses decorated with Mongolian motifs.
And a hint of steppe spirituality, where space and time become one: “Death does not exist as long as you refuse it. »