The countryside where, as we know, at the moment everyone wants to return. It is precisely on this that the novelist Caroline Sers played in her book “The following days”. The premise is simple: a giant blackout in the middle of winter.
We find ourselves in a village in the Dordogne not far from a nuclear power station. The problem is that no one can repair and that the breakdown extended to the whole department will last. The first thing to do is therefore very logically for the inhabitants oforganize their survival when all were caught off guard. And everything will go through the associative café where solidarity will be put in place. Pierre is our hero, a neo-rural who will try to find forgotten gestures far from our virtual world. We are of course talking here about alternative solutions and we understand where Caroline Sers wants to go.
The return to nature, the change of life... A theme that is of great concern to our current society. How a grain of sand in the machine can upset our habits and leave us a bit silly in the face of things that our ancestors mastered and which are essential when we can no longer rely on technology. But it goes further than that, the reflection tends towards the philosophical as well. How do we want to live our lives in the future when we realize that we will no longer be able to continue consuming in this way and mistreating the planet? If it became essential to get closer to nature again and to understand it rather than making it suffer because we need it more than the opposite. It leans towards the side of survivalism and it is true that it is good to question oneself on this theme.
I really liked that Caroline Sers took on the form of the novel to convey her message and also that it was not the apocalypse that she announced to us but simply a power cut which could however leave us in the dark. same embarrassment. And then I also liked to follow the solidarity, the links that are set up between the characters in the turmoil. “The next days”, a reading to ponder before going to buy candles and batteries.