It was first on YouTube that Alex Viens made his mark. Her channel, Granny Grunge, which now no longer exists, was full of humorous and brilliant little gems about gender identities, sexual and bodily diversity, poverty and make-up, offered from a queer and feminist perspective. .
These questions, which have haunted the author since adolescence, are all found, to varying degrees, in Penancesa disturbing and raw first novel, carried by a narrative tension borrowed from nightmares.
The story is orchestrated around Jules and his father, Denis, reunited for the first time after a ten-year silence. At first happy to meet again, the duo settles down around a well-watered spaghetti, to the sound of melancholy and contrasting tunes from The Cure. However, Jules will soon realize that his father — and his dysfunctional love — has lost none of his unpredictability and cruelty.
Alex Viens offers an oppressive and anxiety-provoking camera in which harshness and violence never eclipse the narrative breath, which denies the gaze the possibility of turning away, and in truth, the chance of going unnoticed.
Father and daughter exchange covert threats, then harsh words, turn the iron in old wounds that have not had time to heal, alternately occupy the roles of victim and executioner in a furious crescendo where anger and pain take over reason. In this salvo of snarling replies, the childhood of two little girls is sketched out, caught in the nets of a dangerous and possessive adult, with arbitrary and dubious laws, who subjects them to force-feeding and confinement, forces them to deny and abhor their mother. and women in general, to be wary of difference, to carry within them, forever, violence as the ultimate means of defence.
A voice to follow
Speech is never wandering; the precision of the dialogues is almost theatrical. Cut with a knife, the lines are full of details and fuse in a ballet oscillating between tenderness and anger, without ever moving away from the experience, retaining the momentum of immediacy, impulsiveness and overflow that animate the spoken word. -true.
The writer does much more than recount the abuse, expose its effects and trauma with strong and dizzying images or offer hope for redemption. The experience of its characters – of a monstrous realism – becomes a vehicle to dissect the consequences of financial and intellectual precariousness on children that society lets slip between the meshes of its net. A unique voice to watch.
“Jules knows all the violence. She witnessed her birth in the gaze of her parents like a splinter in the eye, which hurts and drives mad, blinds from being rubbed. The horror unfolded in front of her with her broken dishes, demolished furniture, holes in the walls, her slaps and bruises on her neck – this damage, which is harder to hide, is expensive, causing the school to talk. The violence has undressed in Jules’ room to take up all the space under the sheets, in the throat and between the legs. Jules drank his sweat and his sperm, bitter tastes known to failed adults who seek their father in the sticky beds of bad boys. »