We recognize well, in The solid bodiesJoseph Incardona’s undeniable talent for delving into the absurd, which we discovered with his novel Heatin 2017. The Swiss writer then chose the World Sauna Championship in Finland to explore the limits of what some would be willing to do to win a title.
He invites us here to go behind the scenes of a game show, broadcast in France, whose grand prize is a pickup which will be awarded to the competitor who has managed to keep his hand on the vehicle the longest – live. But it’s the whole first part of the novel that is the most interesting, in fact, the one where we meet Anna, a young widow who raises her 13-year-old son alone. The loss of her street truck in a road accident is only the beginning of the series of setbacks that she will experience until her capitulation – that is to say the moment when she accepts, out of desperation, to participate in the game in which her son enrolled her.
From one end of the novel to the other, the author cynically denounces a society where it has become impossible to live outside the norms. “Anyway, what can we expect from a time when we give the name of a Greek goddess to a model of car? “, he writes. If the rhythm gets heavier in the second half, while we follow the elimination of the competitors one by one, over the hours that pass, the author still manages to depict with skill the challenges of this event where he it is a question of overcoming both fatigue and ridicule. And at the same time, it offers us a rather daring look at the present day… where high-ranking people discuss politics and ratings while human lives are found on the edge of the precipice.
The solid bodies
Joseph Incardona
Finitude
272 pages