Playing with fire means taking the risk of getting burned. This is somewhat illustrated, but without a moral, by the story of the adulterous and destructive passion that Maria Pourchet, author of Rome in a day and of The impatient (Gallimard, 2013 and 2019) details in the remarkable Firehis sixth novel.
Laure, forty years old, a lecturer at a Parisian university, married and mother of two daughters, invites Clément, a high-ranking communications officer in an investment bank, to take part in a symposium in order to “qualify the era”. They will have together, as they say, a story.
Both alternately carry the narrative, and Fire makes us live for more or less two years the meeting, the doubts and the emotions of these two beings that everything should oppose – and that everything will oppose. Let’s face it: there will be no happy ending to this crazy love story.
She talks to herself. He speaks to his dog, an old Bernese mountain dog in declining health whom he calls Papa, “to make my very holy mother die of rage”, he tells himself. The narration, in this way, underlines that they are both locked in their solitude, caught up in the lies they tell each other or that they weakly try to get others to swallow.
The hotel in the afternoon, Siena in August, lies at all times. The lovers are poles apart, and their very relationship is almost non-existent.
For Laure, it’s a tenuous link that comes from obsession, from a pure and misunderstood physical desire that comes down, perhaps, to a desire to feel in motion, still alive. Even if she wants to believe it, she also suspects that this story, this “restaurant love” which is slowly killing her, is destined to set herself on fire.
Whereas for Clément, falling in love is “ordinary and daunting”. An extinct man, on borrowed time, he faces every day the “exhausting verticality” of a life ruled by boredom, navigates with all lights off between the “Blanquise” for which he works and the apartment on the right bank that he shares with his dog. Of the two lovers, he is the more lucid: “She and I have nothing in common, except one thing: we don’t understand each other. »
With a doctor husband, like Emma Bovary, who has become “a man who wants to sleep when you are awake”, Laure, over her shoulder, hears in a permanent voice-over the gall of her “dead, obsessive and talkative” mother.
Maria Pourchet, born in 1980, portrays romantic relationships without bluntness or complacency. She underlines the violence of the feelings that her characters experience, towards each other or towards our time, while addressing the complex relationship with mothers – as in All the women except one (Pauvert, 2018).
This story, which will end badly, as we have said, results in a book that is burning even in its form. Maria Pourchet walks headlong, weighted down with her somewhat dark humour, expressing in a virtuoso style the anger and intractable harshness with which these characters confront each other as much as they flee from each other.
She does it in a lively, frantic and tense style, which makes us experience the state of mind of the protagonists, their inconsistencies and their hesitations. Dazzling.