He is a lyricist, screenwriter, singer, author for children and writer for adults, the prolific Jérôme Attal publishes his new novel with Robert Laffont editions. The age of selfish loves explores the fluctuations and uncertainties of a student at the end of his course.
The story : Nico, a 26-year-old Parisian, sings in a band and studies art history. He must write his dissertation on the canvases that the painter Francis Bacon devoted to the passionate figure of Vincent Van Gogh. In a party, he meets the captivating Laura with whom he will fall madly in love. A love as elusive as the trajectories offered to him in this last year of college.
26 is the age when everything is still possible. It is also the age where you have to choose, the age where little by little couples are formed and their ambitions take shape. Nico, he is careful not to choose. Told in the first person, the story of his last year of study is alternately funny, touching and desperate.
From evenings with friends to daydreams in the Luxembourg Gardens, the young hero squanders his time and persists in remaining above the void, prisoner of his feelings for the young Laura, an inaccessible beauty. A love without departure or destination, never really happened.
In this year where everything seems to escape because it’s the year of the end, the end of a cycle and nothing happens for me, neither success with the group, nor the ideal trajectory with the university or the long-awaited escape route, the appearance of this girl is the most concrete thing that I have sought to retain, pursue and deepen.
“The Age of Selfish Loves”page 85
Around Nico, there is his mother and his “signature phrase” : “You’ll have to find a job, we won’t be here forever.” There is his father, depressed, who has transformed his Parisian two-piece into a spaceship and who cannot come down to earth. There are friends who seem to find their ways and build their lives without further questioning. There is the indecisive Laura, jealous of her freedom. In the midst of all this, Nico watches for signs and invents talismans like so many poetic crutches to face reality.
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The author willingly admits that there is a bit of him in this “young man at the edge of the diving board who does not dare to jump into the water”. He may be 50 years old, more than 400 songs written in his repertoire (awarded in 2020 from the Grand Prix Sacem de la chanson française) and around twenty books, he still says to himself that each novel is the first. “I was 20 in the 90s and I knew this wandering, he says, this form of immaturity at a time when society invites us to belong to a tribe or a category and urges us to make choices.”
Is it the influence of his activity as a lyricist that gave him the opportunity to write for Vanessa Paradis, Johnny Hallyday, Florent Pagny or Michel Delpech? Jérôme Attal’s novel is full of aphorisms. “I like the punchline and the catchy phrase”, confides the author who is never so happy as when he meets readers with one of his works “stabilized” from all sides.
Through the pages and wanderings of his hero, The age of selfish loves is also a story of ham, Bacon with a capital B, head of cabbage and cut ear because in life, encounters are a bit like that: always nourishing and sometimes eccentric.
“The age of selfish love” by Jérôme Attal, Robert Laffont editions, 222 pages, 19 euros.