A man, dumped by his wife, decides to flee to another country. To indulge entirely in his pleasure? Not at all. This time, he thought, want nothing. This time, want to disappear, me. Not to redo my life. Rather get out. »
Posted at 4:30 p.m.
With this first collection of short stories, Louis Carmain auscultates the tiny aspirations of men and women caught in the antechamber of their own existence, held elsewhere than in the present by their dreams, their regrets or by these stories which they rock, convinced that they deserve better. To deserve better in love.
In a series of intimate settings – essentially that of the couple, limping or nascent – which contrasts with the large settings embraced by his novels, the author of Guano and Offerings explores the vast question of identity, this slippery and elusive thing, of which little remains when what unites us to others flies away. What remains once the fictions we blind ourselves to have crumbled in on themselves, like so many houses of cards? Than the sum of our great sufferings and our little shames?
There remains this humor specific to Louis Carmain, a humor so finely concealed under the sentence that it would be easy to confuse it with what is most lucid in resignation. And if some of these six short stories distill an absurd strangeness (the author intertwines childhood traumas and potatoes in the tragicomic-Freudian exercise that is “Lessons of sleep”), the strangeness here is above all that , painfully banal, of these lives which seem to unfold on the margins of themselves.
“Nydia understood that Serge was fleeing his own desire, his realization, that life seemed to have made him for daydreaming, for an existence so discreet and passive that he could, in the end, cross the wall separating life from death. without making her shudder. Straddling this boundary, Louis Carmain paints a portrait, both empathetic and caustic, of these characters refusing to give in entirely to their own wear and tear.
portable nights
Louis Carmain
VLB editor
168 pages