"A French novel" is a novel by French writer Frederic Beigbeder, author of "99 francs", "Love lasts 3 years" or even "Windows on the World" , published in 2009.
January 28, 2008, while his brother is preparing to receive the Legion of Honor, Frederic Beigbeder is questioned by the police while snorting cocaine on the hood of a car with a another writer.
ensues when an extended detention during which he will experience the torments of the interrogation of total excavation and its claustrophobic confinement has trouble managing.
Anxieties rise and will run up against childhood memories that the author thought he had forgotten. Digging up and take refuge in the maze of his memory then appears as the only way for the writer to escape from his dark cell.
" All childhoods are perhaps not novels but mine is one. A sad drama, a failed love affair with my brother and I are the fruit. We had a Canada Dry happiness. It is a life that has the appearance of happiness: Neuilly, the beautiful neighborhoods of Paris, cities Pau, Guéthary Beach or Bali ... it's like to happiness, happiness but it seems this is not happiness. We should be happy, it is not, so we pretend. "p.231
" A French novel "can be considered a small UFO in the work of the author. The use of the word" novel "in the title does not refer to content as that at finding the author regrets that the lie of his parents on the actual circumstances of their divorce has done live in a fiction for many years.
If his previous novels hinted as much disguised biography of a man defiant , arrogant, irresponsible, selfish and deeply locked into a "perpetual present," "A French novel" looks like the backstage life of the author, an opportunity for him to summon memories buried, to freeze his childhood, move in time to accept aging sum.
Alongside interrogation and detention conditions described as inhumane, the author evokes the turn of the boy flashes and adolescents wise, shy and complexed it was still down compared to his older brother struggles to lead a structured life while he deliberately took tangent.
Without denying its origins and the positive aspects of a privileged childhood, it also addresses the shortcomings of which he suffered as the son of divorced, he shared the lifestyle diametrically opposed to his parents and spent his time between homes in the company step-parents who recurred frequently.
It examines the impact that non-sense have had on his adult life and how he reproduces a diagram against his family marked by the absence of the father over the generations.
Yet there is here no trace of rancor or trial. The author takes this opportunity to pay tribute to these heroic ancestors died for their country, the brother he loved despite their differences, the parents who raised him as they could, to her daughter through her questions and discoveries offers him the chance to relive his childhood .
" A single woman who is raising two children, is the penitentiary. Since I realized what a single mother: this is someone who gave you life in order to sacrifice his own. She left our father and our stepfather, and from that time no longer sought to atone for the sins that we do not blame him. It decided to be an independent woman, that is to say a saint as his grandfather killed in the war of 14.
I know many writers have had grievances against their mother. In my case, there is only gratitude. His love was immeasurable. She had to realize that we, at least, never leave that for which she was mistaken. "p.248
Well let it be said, this is an autobiography which means for once fully assumed narcissism.
Inevitably, when we hear about his life, we comes to talking about yourself - logic - like to talk about the environment in which we grew to able to be compared to his ancestors, his parents, his time, etc..
Although I concede that the genealogical aspects are a must when engaged in the practice of autobiography, I have to admit that they annoyed me somewhat as I am not interested in the mundane and middle its protagonists.
I was primarily curious about the look worn by Frederic Beigbeder on an idyllic childhood my faith from the outside, that it remains what once scraped the thick layer of varnish.
Some readers have summarized this book in an amount of unjustified whining. I can not give them both because I think every experience is experienced differently by each of us and each wants suffering singular and incomparable.
Just because that pain can be considered small compared to others that it can not be expressed. If it did, nobody could complain more since there is always worse somewhere else.
So if I freely admit that the author could have suffered a childhood too sheltered and a stay in prison, I did not really appreciated the updates in parallel upright between his life and the fate of his ancestors and other writers. I much preferred
passages where the author was content to his voice alone, without recourse to examples from history that gleaming far from supporting the truthfulness of his approach gave him a grotesque character.
For the rest, we found the leg of the author, his short chapters, her way of telling a story in the adjoining numerous references to literature, music, film, advertising, plenty of marks that recall its social origins but cynical humor unfortunately much less now, as if the author had thought fit to temper his remarks to finally be taken seriously.
Admittedly, this reading was not a torture but I preferred However, when the author was featured in a fictional angle.
Other opinions BOB!
"A French novel" is part of the French selection QD9 Award launched by Cecile . 
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