The first novel by Éric Ilhareguy (Moussaka, 2016) opens with a mother who, in collusion with her son and daughter, throws their father and two trash bags containing his personal effects into the street. Maddened with rage, he comes back, determined to expose the truth about the son’s origins – “illegitimate child, filthy bastard”. From then on, the two kids become captive of their mother’s strange universe, made up of boring soap operas, an inexhaustible verve on the phonetic alphabet and vowel trapezoids and an impressive sense of investigation. Approaching the world through etymology, she presents for them all the possibilities of this new reality. With a lively and disordered language, the writer displays all the singularity of a thought in movement and manages, through judicious digressions, to explore the extent or inanity of the relationships between fiction and the construction of oneself as well as their roles in our ability to outline the future. Éric Ilhareguy goes off the beaten track by offering delicious characters who refuse to submit to what their past expects of them.
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