When you opened the door to Chez Moineau in the early 1950s, you couldn’t miss in this small bar on the left bank in Paris the group of young pre-punks who were part of the decor, a group of “hopeless” friends. , withdrawn into itself.
Among them, in their center, shining like a black sun: Jacqueline Harispe, whom everyone called Kaki, “the queen of the neighborhood”, young woman with a difficult childhood, as beautiful as she was intelligent, briefly a model at Dior . She committed suicide at the age of 20 by throwing herself one evening in November 1953 from the balcony of the hotel room where she lived with her lover, Boris Grgurevich, an American addicted to heroin like her.
It was enough for Philippe Jaenada, interested in “lives that change and deviate”, for him to dedicate his new investigative novel, Casualness is a beautiful thingto the eternal youth of Kaki (or Kaky), already crossed as a character in a novel by Patrick Modiano (In the cafe of lost youthin 2007).
Wanting to understand what could have led to this tragedy, the author of Life and Death of the Blonde Girl (Grasset, 2004) describes having entered a world from which he can no longer escape. He will try to find a way out by making a “tour of France by the edges”, dictaphone in hand, touching the six corners of France in three weeks.
From Dunkirk to Hendaye, via Menton and Évian-les-Bains, Jaenada collects hotel rooms and small bistros in search of an atmosphere and floating memories, a diver immersed in the early Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the 1950s. On the road, swallowing the kilometers (5,342 km, to be precise) and the glasses of whiskey, the writer conducts his investigation from a distance, compares facts and legends, throws poles and rewinds his lines.
He does it as always with parentheses and digressions, drawing on news items, as in The little female or in The billhook (Julliard, 2015 and 2017), which won him the Femina prize, and each time giving us the impression of entering his head.
“Swallowed” by an album of photographs by the Dutchman Ed van der Elsken, Love on the Left Bankthe writer makes the photos speak and goes back to each of the tracks in his own way. Some lead to Montreal, where some of Kaki’s friends later migrated: Patrick Straram (who would become a figure of Quebec counterculture in the 1970s, long remaining madly in love with the young woman), as well as André and Minou Petrowski (Kaki and Boris will be witnesses at their wedding).
One of these diligent young people at Chez Moineau was the famous Guy Debord. The author of The entertainment society (1967), “melancholic and intransigent alcoholic”, writes Jaenada, would have been strongly inspired by this magnificently idle youth to give shape to his Lettrist International (whose manifesto gave Jaenada the title of his book: “Insinvolvure is a very beautiful thing, but our desires were perishable and disappointing).
Children of bandits, deportees or collaborators, orphans or petty bourgeois who have broken their ban, they cling to their wounds or their difficulty in living. They carried both lightness and heaviness, the scars, the failings and the promises of their time, united by “the refusal of time and aging” (Debord).
His “Sparrows”, as he calls them, rebellious kids who touch him, lost girls who delight and despair him, the ornithologist Philippe Jaenada pulls them out with a certain brilliance from the magma of anonymity and archives. It connects them together like so many stars in a distant constellation.
A sort of group portrait with drama, ramified and teeming.