“What do you like to do, what do you want as a career?” Huge question when you are 16 years old. Zako does not know. He is the only one of his group of friends to reorient himself. There is Aimée, who is going to study in Marseille, but she is to become a confirmed footballer. So, in Madame Satriano’s office, the CPE, which lists her “mechanics, gardening, woodworking…” he finishes “by saying yeah, right after “woodworking”” out of spite. He can’t refuse everything anyway. “Zako came out stunned, the professional path, woodworking, boarding school, the mountains, all of that seemed unreal to him” but was nevertheless going to take shape at the start of the next school year. Perched in the middle “little heaps of battered houses” in Moirans-en-Montagne, Zako has to acclimatize both to this environment and to his new classmates. Specifically to Max, a young transgender boy born “with a wooden spoon in the mouth”.
In living bark, third volume in his series Hypallage (Amour Chrome, Sister land in 2021), Sylvain Pattieu interferes in the thoughts of Zako, awkward in the face of transidentity. “Transitioning? You mean like in an airport? We can not help but have a slight smile in the face of this ingenuous awkwardness. Zako questions himself and moves away from his preconceived ideas on the subject. Following his visit to a professional high school in Franche-Comté, Sylvain Pattieu conceived this novel which takes place in a class specializing in the arts of wood. The winner of the Friday prize seems to have never lost his adolescent look, both poetic and provocative, like his style, lyrical and oral. “My mother would have frowned at all this vocabulary before doing research”, laughs Sylvain Pattieu in the thanks. Us too, sometimes.
The life of Zako’s friends who remained in Saint-Denis is not a long calm river either. All the difficulties associated with adolescence arise. Muhammad-Ali, protagonist ofAmour Chrome, juggles graffiti “with his crew” and his relationship with Sarah. “She kisses him, she looks seriously relaxed, it stresses him out. She has more experience, he told himself. She slept with a guy once, that’s a hundred times more than me.” It’s wobbly and touching. Like Margaux, in love with Jade then Satsuki (yes, like the little girl in I could do Totoro by Miyazaki). Everything goes fast at this age. Loves are made and undone in a snap of the fingers.
They do not always understand everything that is happening to them: “It was doing something in his stomach, a battalion of great tits pecking and bickering.” Lina was attacked by the captain of the water polo team, tweeted him and was accused of lying. Friendship, a stable element, plays a beneficent beacon in these events that turn them upside down.