Philippe Besson continues his novelistic cycle begun a few years ago with Stop with your lies by placing itself at the heart of this story inspired by an event experienced in the mid-1980s.
It’s summer, he is 18 years old and, like every year, he is preparing to happily return to the Ile de Ré, where his family spends their vacation at their friends’ house. In the company of their son of the same age and two other boys, they meet people, take advantage of their carefree time and let themselves be guided by their “babying libido”, drunk with the happiness of being free and idle.
But one evening, this famous summer evening of the title, a tragedy occurs and will mark the end of innocence for the young man. “Who knows if we don’t have to go through this kind of ordeal to grow up, to become adults? », he asks. Those who loved Paris-Briançon will find the same enveloping writing and this finesse in describing the blind spots and the details that few people note, but which he discerns with acuity.
The French writer, who has always defined himself as “a novelist of the sensitive”, has no equal when it comes to describing feelings and sensations, and he proves his talent once again in this novel, without however reaching the intensity of the powerful This is not a news item (published last year). Between the guilt that haunted him for a long time and the mirages that made him run behind silhouettes for years, it is with poetry and a vague nostalgia that he looks back on this painful memory of his youth.
A summer evening
Julliard
208 pages