2023-11-25 03:51:00
In a novel built on several temporalities, Cécile Balavoine sets out in search of the mysterious past of Sasha, her New York lover lost sight of for twenty years.
For a long time I traveled with Cécile Balavoine on Air France lines. She wrote in the magazine of this company that I frequented regularly for my professional trips. I deliberately practice autofiction here since it is this literary form that is discussed in his novels. In Au reverse de la nuit, Cécile Balavoine describes a bond for which there is not really a name: this affection that we retain for a youthful lover, made even more singular by his premature death.
It begins one winter evening, in the mid-90s, on a train crossing the United States from west to east. And it is the meeting of the author and a young man out of step with his times, dressed in a long coat, two-tone shoes, a Borsalino hat, a character from the 1930s in the middle of the grunge era. We will discover that it is about Sasha, a young New Yorker returning to his city after a few years spent in San Francisco and whose desire is to open a café. But who will end up opening a bar. A cocktail bar, almost clandestine, a sort of speakeasy, like in the Prohibition era.
Twenty years pass. It is now the end of summer 2015. The adult narrator gets on a plane. She briefly returned to New York, where she lived for a number of years. As she takes off, she discovers an article from the New York Times that a friend has just sent her: Sasha died the day before, suddenly, at the age of 42. At this moment, two decades after their meeting, the narrator understands that Sasha had become a personality in New York nightlife. What else will she not have seen about him during all these years?
The novel, built on several levels of temporality, reads a bit like an investigation, or like an impossible quest, one which would consist of casting an adult’s gaze on this man from his youth. In an a posteriori rereading of their bond, the narrator will revisit the past and try to understand a complex, confusing, whimsical man, who embodied the New York of the time, but whom she had only ever looked at casually.
The book takes place in the 90s and 2000s, but also in 2015 and 2022, and it tells a return to a bygone New York. He also questions atypical loves (they often are in Cécile Balavoine). These seemingly chance encounters which we realize, in hindsight, to what extent they have shaped us.
Cécile Balavoine, On the other side of the night. Mercure de France, 272 pp., €21 (ebook: €14.99).
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