The musician and until then Nouvelliste signs a first novel, “Avalanche”. These two young brothers in the Swiss Alps, it is undoubtedly a little him, but it is also the experience, universal, of the youth who ends.
by Fabrice Gabriel (Collaborator of the “World of Books”)
By becoming a writer, Raphael found his surname and the trema of his first name: he “declared his name”, one might say, according to the expression which serves as a sign for a famous poem by René Char. It is therefore Raphaël Haroche who, after two beautiful collections of news (return to the sea and an eclipse, Gallimard, 2017 and 2021), signs today Avalanche, a teenage initiation story whose title could still be that of ‘A song, thus recalling, like a vocal nod, the “caravan” of an album which was for him a consecration and earned him a victory of music in 2006.
of adolescence, the writer and 47 -year -old singer obviously kept something, in his presence, if not his clothing: an aura of smiling shyness, at the same time as a determination that we guess almost Farouche, and especially the air of being blased by nothing. “It’s beautiful …”, he notes, taking a dreamy look towards the blundered winter gardens of the Gallimard house, where “MO12345lemonde des Books” came to meet him. Let’s just say that he has charm. And we feel that his shift to literature is lived, very sincerely, as an event.
This is not an abandonment of music, of course, since he continues to present his magnetic band show on stage, but something like an evolution, an important step in a man’s life. “Music, he says, is really my first love, and long literature seemed to me something inaccessible, academic … And then I started writing news, a few years ago , a little by chance, and I got a taste for a form of writing that is no longer only that of the songs: I can even say that it is something that has deeply changed my relationship with others, to experience That we can do things … There is of course continuity, news to the novel, and I must clarify that the news as a genre has really counted a lot for me, as a reader: those for example of Joyce, de Tchekhov, or the short stories of Kafka, are among the texts that have most permanently marked me. “
The memory of a really experienced trauma?
Avalanche recounts a few months in the life of two brothers of 16 and 12 years old, Léonard and Nicolas: the elder leads the story, smokes Merit, is devilishly worked by sex and often animated with almost violent energy, When his youngest still almost child is rather the original and tender excluded, extraordinarily gifted for the piano, who believes in magical thought to join his dead mother … At the very end of the 1980s, both come back as students of A opulent boarding school, in Switzerland of lakes and luxury, which does not exclude hazing or distress.
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