In her new book, the writer, present to have read !, Remember the accidental death of her companion in 1999. A gap that she lives today with gentleness and nostalgia.
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They were at the threshold of a new start. He was 41 years old, and music for the reason of being. She 36 years old, and writing as a point of balance. Parents of a little boy, the young couple, a bit bohemian, had just acquired a house on the edge of the city. A protective cocoon where they could finally put their suitcases and project themselves, they believed, carefree and sure of themselves, for a whole life … but they will not have time. On June 22, 1999, while Claude went to take Théo at the end of the school, he kills himself on a motorcycle. “I moved alone with our son, at the heart of a fairly brutal chronological sequence. Signature of the act of sale. Accident, moving. Funeral”, writes Brigitte Giraud, in the preamble to live quickly, while she Find, twenty later, again about to start a new step.
Because, to the repeated assaults of the promoters who plan to build a building and – cruel irony – a road, the novelist ended up yielding. And by signing the act of sale of this house which was, at the early days of mourning, the witness of his sorrow, a painful rage. A “carcass” where, for a long time, she lived in the sleepwalker, banging on the walls. Before taming it, taking pleasure in embellishing it, in order to make it the framework of a life for itself and her son. And also the link that would link it to Claude.
While she is about to make the keys, as we go around the owner, Brigitte Giraud decided to go around the question. Of all the outstanding questions. Starting with the causes of the accident that remained unexplained. And, with them, of all that could have hypothetically had it: if she had not stuck to visit the house; if she had not warned her mother from her purchase; If his brother had not parked his motorbike at home in their garage; If she had not changed the date of her trip to her publisher in Paris; If she had had a mobile phone…
Life in the past conditional
A litany of “si”, obsessive, who, now his life in the past conditional, pushed him to question himself, to question his friends, his loved ones, to meet the one who rescued Claude, to come back to the Places of the accident to make it a precise topography, to compulize the specialized press and to skim motorcycle sites to document the Honda CBR Fireblade, prohibited in Japan but not for export in Europe. “When no catastrophe occurs, we advance without turning around, we fix the horizon line, straight ahead. When a drama arises, we turn back, we come back to haunt the place, we proceed to the reconstruction. We want to understand the ‘Origin of each gesture, each decision. We rewind a hundred times. We become the specialist in cause and effect. We track down, we scatter, we autopsy. We want to know everything about human nature, intimate and collective springs that make this Who arrives, arrives … “
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