On the tip of Cap Ferret, between the Arcachon basin and the Atlantic, a man worn out by life, once a great reveler and artist of the Parisian nightlife, writes alone in a hut facing the sea. The place where he lies should have already been swallowed up by the ocean. Writing seems laborious, each sentence is a snatch victory “ink over the void”.
The man who writes sets up a formal device that he will maintain for a good part of the novel: after each sentence, he skips a line and returns to the left margin, in the manner of David Foenkinos in Charlotte. But this man is Frédéric Beigbeder, and the life he tells us, through aphorisms, is his.
Billed as a “non-fiction novel”, A dam against the Atlanticnod to Barrage against the Pacificde Duras, could also announce itself as the confession of a child of the century. A 55-year-old child-turned-privileged white male with the beginnings of ecological and environmental awareness. Volume 2 ofA novel French (2009, Renaudot Prize), the novel is divided into four “books”. The first, in which Beigbeder exposes his formal reflections, is painful at times, and he is aware of it: “The author tries to survive, the reader not to get bored”. We confirm.
In the second part, the ex-advertiser confesses and looks back on his bourgeois childhood, his parents’ divorce, analyzes the clash generations, revisits his first amorous emotions, realizes that we have come to the end of the night, that the party is over and that the day rises on an uncertain dawn.
His confidence is generous, and he does not give himself the most beautiful role. Here and there, his mood of the moment gives way to small flashes. Beigbeder proves to be much more agile in the role of swaggering observer than when he dons the rather oversized clothes of a moral philosopher… When, pointing finger, he denounces our bad habits while he stuffs himself with beauty with his feet in the sand on the tip of Cap Ferret with his wealthy friends, we roll our eyes and laugh a little at his candor. Like Emmanuel Carrère and Michel Houellebecq, he tackles the malaise of modern man, but not with the same flexibility as his comrades and without departing from a self-centered posture which has certain limits.
The real hero of the novel is Benoît Bartherotte, a former stylist and businessman. This Sisyphus in underpants works to save the sandy point from being swallowed up, at his own expense. By consolidating the dyke on a daily basis, he erected the barrage against the Atlantic mentioned in the title.
In the home stretch, Beigbeder notes that beauty is the only safe haven. The blanks between the sentence-paragraphs have disappeared, and nature takes back its rights. “The only trash I tolerate on this beach is me. It’s his self-mockery that makes him likeable to us. More irreverence and a little less presumption would have allowed this novel to win a stronger support from the reader.