“To become a legend, you tell your story in a certain way. To become a martyr, we tell it differently, emphasizing something else. » In his third book, Rich and poor, Jacob Wren insists on a tense face-to-face between a satisfied billionaire and the declassed and obsessed man who dreams of assassinating him, thus throwing the first stone of a social revolution. A tense double monologue in which voices alternate.
A former concert pianist, now poor, this unnamed man moonlights as a dishwasher in a restaurant while mulling his plan: to assassinate the billionaire, hoping to create a large number of followers and imitators in the process. “I wanted to kill a billionaire and have others imitate me and kill billionaires in turn. »
Boss of a multinational, arriving there after “twenty years of panache and machinations”, the billionaire thrives on a cynicism that is as calm as it is uninhibited. “Of course, the profits we made were hurting people and the planet. Of course, this harm was irreparable. » Nothing in the history of humanity, he adds, allows us to believe that things could happen otherwise.
To implement its “clear and violent” objective, the first will seek to approach as close as possible to its target. Trying, for example, to get hired by a security firm. Acquire a share of the multinational and attend the annual meeting. Or try to get closer to the former right-hand man of the leader, who fell from grace around ten years ago. And always keep a piano wire in one of your pockets, always ready to strangle your target — you never know.
But this “quixotic enterprise” will come to an end. Man, forced to retreat, will instead discover the virtues of strategy and strength in numbers to achieve his ends. A story that is a bit far-fetched, certainly, but which exposes the faults of both parties and often takes us beyond the Manichaeism that we might have expected.
The criminal joy of piratess, a small book made up of three texts which appears at the same time, offers two short stories and an essay on art which can be read in the wake of Rich and poor.
In “The Mole”, a narrator who knows he is “deeply dishonest” recounts his undercover work within an anti-capitalist group. A piece of light cynicism which without seeming confronts everyone’s duplicities, our doubts and our cowardice. In “Four Letters in an Ongoing Series,” an author faces a series of disappointments and rejection letters from editors about a manuscript. One of them, in particular, begins to shake him to push him to act. “Rather than groveling, like you, cowardly trying to pass off your apathy as literature. »
In “Like a priest having lost his faith”, notes on art, emptiness, meaning and spirituality, the author of The family is created by copulating, “in crisis about art and everything else”, launches a call for elevation and a form of transcendence.
Texts loaded with self-irony in which the Montreal author, born in Jerusalem in 1971, also a director and performance artist, takes an inside look at a certain margin that is perhaps too often satisfied.