In this intimate tale in two voices, Mélanie Noël gives us a sense of the deep and free love that binds two seemingly opposite beings, but whose complementarity will allow them to weather the storms.
There is Marie. Fiercely in love with freedom, she flees to the four corners of the world, focusing her lens and her gaze on the collateral victims of a world in disarray, perhaps to avoid diving into herself. Then Matthieu, a sedentary computer scientist and musician with a quiet happiness, who welcomes her into his cocoon after an impromptu meeting on the evening of their 30th birthdays. From there will be born an atypical love, punctuated by the arrivals and departures of Marie, to whom Matthieu never asks for accounts.
Journalist, lyricist and author, Mélanie Noël knows how to handle words and images with finesse. The novel alternates between epistolary segments where he addresses her, and vice versa, interspersed with short poems and chapters that tell their story from day 0 of their meeting, but also delve into their past and that of their loved ones. In doing so, we delve into the intimacy of the characters, discover the underlying motives that shaped them, their flaws and their strengths.
In the end, The intimacy of chaos is a touching story with a fairly slow pace (we really got hooked halfway through), focused more on the characters’ inner lives than on the action, and which addresses sensitive subjects such as motherhood, family ties and the contradictions of humanitarian tourism.
The intimacy of chaos
Hammock
216 pages