2023-11-11 10:55:00
«A“O great men, a grateful homeland” can we read on the pediment of the Pantheon. But what about other men? Let them die. Like the hero of Little Pranksters, by Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld (Deux-Magots Prize for Sand castle in 2021), found lying and greenish by the cleaning lady, from the first paragraph. “Paul Beuvron, the man of a thousand masks and hoaxes, was indeed dead. Life, it’s a shame, can’t always be a comedy. » Paul, it’s Rastignac. Originally from Grenoble, he came to Paris to become Stendhal. He had written a wildly ambitious first book but no one had read it. So, as he had to survive, he wrote for others, and not the best – terrible ministers, « patapoufs patibulaires ». The world of publishing, a backwater full of old crocs, stank like carrion, and then there were women, and love too: Paul had sunk, like those who end up too small because of dreaming too big. Death is always a mystery. That of Paul, like his life before it, is Henri, his old friend from hypokhâgne, who tells them. Almost the same as Paul, Henri, but the added lucidity changes everything. Parisian, writer and piss-copy in a newspaper but aware that even if he became a great writer, as Balzac said, he would not be “never more than a little prankster”. A satire of the literary industry, this witty and caustic novel is also and above all a requiem for the friend, Paul, who dreamed of disappearing off the coast of Salina Cruz like Arthur Cravan, but died like a dog in a living room. “The cursed do not lead the high life, writes La Rochefoucauld. We can’t have spleen and money for spleen. »
“The Little Pranksters”, by Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld (Robert Laffont, 256 p., €20).
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