Born in Paris in 1972, Fabrice Colin has dabbled in all literary genres over the past 25 years, from science fiction to thrillers, including children’s literature and comics. Last January, at the Calmann-Lévy editions, the writer published what is probably his most personal book to date, an initiatory novel, partly autobiographical, with a Baudelairian title: You demanded the evening.
To flee his banal life, his business studies, his suburbs, his spouse, his troubled past and his inability to feel the intoxication procured for others by alcohol—in short, to flee himself—the narrator, who bears the same first name as the author, hangs out in the streets of the Marais. When his trajectory meets that of Iago and Brume, Fabrice’s life changes completely. Both fascinating and morbid, burning the candle at both ends, capable of the worst machinations, are his new friends really brother and sister? What role does Axël play then, the one who completes the terrible trio? Wouldn’t he be Iago’s lover?
In 1994, two years before the arrival of triple therapy in France, the Marais was ravaged by AIDS. “Each was a story, each a pain. At first an observer, almost a voyeur, then less and less exterior to the action, the narrator describes with sublime language the overwhelming embrace of Eros and Thanatos. In the Palace, the private mansion of the Marquis, nickname given to the dandy Stanislas, spectacular evenings stage the will of the condemned to leave in style. “I had come to lose myself, and I had gotten what I wanted, but it was even worse. There was nothing at the heart of the labyrinth. Just myself. »
From the shadow to the light
In the style it adopts as well as in the themes it tackles, the first half of the novel offers an irresistible dark romanticism, a form of deliciously old-fashioned end-of-the-century decadence. Lush prose, refined lexicon, fine descriptions of places and states of mind… We immediately think of the Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde, but also to Barbey d’Aurevilly and his diabolical. So much so that we sometimes even forget that the action of this intimate and social fable takes place at the end of the 20th century.and century.
In the second half of the book, the tone changes, gradually letting light take over. It’s time for truths to come out and accounts to be settled. Fabrice reconnects with the forest, with his father, rediscovers what he was trying to flee, a heavy secret, infinite guilt, a fault to be expiated. The gaze plunged into that of a deer, the young man allows the trials to pass through him, and no longer to determine him. “What was left of me? My thirst for forgiveness, my insatiable appetite for pain, death and madness, nestled closer to my heart, and which, at times, had taken its place… All of this was falling apart under the impassive fire of his pupil. »