We will not surprise anyone by saying that Hugo Meunier (Missed, The boss) is not the first artist to be interested in the seven deadly sins. Over the centuries, avarice, anger, envy, gluttony, lust, pride and laziness have inspired painters, playwrights and writers, from Seneca to Maupassant via Bertolt Brecht and Hieronymus Bosch. Even Christian Bégin made it the subject of his first solo show.
With his incisive and irreverent humor, the journalist, who notably lends his pen to Urbaniaoffers a resolutely modern twist to these pillars of Western Christian thought in Ordinary sinsa choral novel divided into seven short stories intrinsically linked to each other.
The result, fragmented and coherent, would be summarized as follows: ordinary heroes, captured in ordinary moments of their lives, battered by ordinary emotions, desires and regrets, which nevertheless take on disproportionate proportions.
We therefore meet a man whose self-esteem is hurt by a breakup and another who becomes mad with jealousy during a trip where his girlfriend seduces everywhere she goes. Elsewhere, an old couple wants to add some spice to their daily lives, a slave takes risks in the name of freedom, a failed musician wins the jackpot, a police officer is cheated by his prejudices and seven influencers compete for attention on an island deserted.
With these dynamic and well-crafted stories – in which the choral intention is sometimes a little too strong – Hugo Meunier holds up a mirror to readers, ignoring the spiritual aspect of his subject to decline it in its daily manifestations, the most banal to the extremes. He thus gives anecdotes heard a thousand times a more human side, unearthing their roots as well as the role of filiation and inheritance in their existence.
After a few forays into autofiction, Hugo Meunier took his first steps into romantic fiction with Ordinary sinswithout the essence of his writing being tainted, for better or for worse.
Thus, the reporter resolutely frames his novel in the period, multiplying musical and cultural references, sometimes citing three in the same paragraph; an amusing process, which however does not always serve the story. The subjects covered — feminicides, social networks, #MeToo, racial profiling — are also anchored in current events, so much so that the reader will at times have the impression of browsing the pages of a newspaper rather than those of a novel. Although the concept of the book justifies this desire to paint a portrait of the modern era, the reading is a little heavy.
Fortunately, Hugo Meunier knows how to create endearing and credible characters, who, despite all their vices and contradictions, make you want to follow them until the end.