“Live fast”, by Brigitte Giraud, Flammarion, 206 p., €20, digital €15.
They were on the threshold of a new beginning. He was 41 years old, and music for a reason. She is 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 town. A protective cocoon where they could finally put their suitcases and project themselves, they believed, carefree and sure of themselves, for an entire life… But they won’t have the time. On June 22, 1999, when Claude was picking Theo up from school, he killed himself on a motorbike. “I moved in alone with our son, at the heart of a rather brutal chronological sequence. Signature of the deed of sale. Accident, move. Funeral »writes Brigitte Giraud, in the preamble to live fastwhen she finds herself, twenty later, about to start a new stage.
Because, to the repeated assaults of promoters who plan to build a building and – cruel irony – a road, the novelist ended up giving in. And by signing the deed of sale of this house which was, in the early days of mourning, the witness of his grief, of a painful rage. A “carcass” where, for a long time, she lived like a sleepwalker, bumping into the walls. Before taming it, taking pleasure in embellishing it, in order to make it the setting of a lifetime for her and her son. And also the link that would connect her to Claude.
As she prepares to return the keys, as we go around the owner, Brigitte Giraud has decided to go around the question. Of all the outstanding questions. Starting with the causes of the accident that have remained unexplained. And, with them, of everything that could, hypothetically, have avoided it: if she hadn’t persisted in visiting the house; if she hadn’t told her mother about her purchase; if his brother hadn’t parked his motorbike at home in their garage; if she had not changed the date of her visit to her publisher in Paris; If she had a cell phone…
Life in the past conditional
A haunting litany of “if”s which, keeping her life in the past conditional, pushed her to question herself, to question her friends, her relatives, to meet the person who came to Claude’s aid, to return to the scene of the accident to make a precise topography, to consult the specialized press and to scour motorcycle sites to document the Honda CBR Fireblade, banned in Japan but not for export to Europe. “When no disaster occurs, we move forward without looking back, we stare at the horizon line, straight ahead. When a tragedy 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 specialists in cause and effect. We track down, we dissect, we autopsy. We want to know everything about human nature, the intimate and collective springs that make what happens, happens…”
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