Could the tragedy have been avoided? This question obsesses the narrator on the train that takes him back to the family home of Blanquefort in Gironde. Her mother, Céline Morand, has just been killed with seventeen stab wounds by her father, who disappeared into thin air. Léa, her 13-year-old little sister, who witnessed the horror, called her in a state of shock. The young man tortures himself for not having seen anything coming. Because for five years, this 19-year-old boy has devoted himself to his vocation for dance in Paris. And this, despite the hostility of this father, a quasi-stranger for him. Torn between the desire to know more and the fear of being broken by the truth, he delves into the couple’s past.
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On the spot, he questions neighbours, friends, colleagues, lawyers. And discovers the harbingers of tragedy: arguments, slaps, physical and moral collapse of a mother under Prozac. She alone knew her husband’s duplicity. Charming on the outside, he belittled her, humiliated her, twisted her brain. The overused term of narcissistic pervert takes on its full meaning here. Céline Morand, we learn, had filed a handrail. Who should be alerted to stop the inevitable?
Increasingly dark in his themes, Philippe Besson studies feminicide from the angle of the collateral victims, the children of the disaster. He auscultates a gaping wound, the indelible consequences. It evokes the course of the parents, their meeting, the wear and the deterioration of their relations. In his concise style, with implacable lucidity, he recounts not a news item but a fact of society whose damning statistics are given to us every year. He highlights the negligence, the cowardice, the inconsistencies that lead to irreparable damage.
This is not a news item, by Philippe Besson, Julliard, 208 p., 20 euros.
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Philippe Besson is the author of 22 novels including “His brother” (2001), adapted for the cinema by Patrick Chéreau, and “L’Arrière-Saison”, grand prize RTL-Lire 2003. “Stop with your lies”, prize of the Houses of la Presse 2017, sold 165,000 copies.
