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Hélèna Villovitch |
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« Dans Sofa, je n’ai pas pu garder les vrais prénoms car si je l’avais fait il y aurait un seul prénom. Tous les personnages s’appelleraient Hélèna. Ce ne serait pas facile pour s’y reconnaître. La fille qui hérite des problèmes de sa mère c’est moi. La mère qui ne peut pas s’empêcher d’emmerder sa progéniture c’est moi aussi. Le petit ami qui adore jouer au ping-pong c’est encore moi. Le type qui collectionne des petits bidules en plastique c’est toujours moi et l’ami d’enfance qui raconte les vieilles histoires c’est moi, moi et moi. J’ai donc dû inventer des prénoms. »
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After L’immobilier, a collection of short stories discribing the various ways of living friendships, loves, and solitude Hélèna Villovitch focuses upon an element of furniture as familiar as it is symbolic : the sofa, which can mean the mere couch in a flat or the divan, where we curl up with our obsessions and unconscious desires. The novel opens with a film presentation, where the reader is invited to view a movie called Sofa which deals with the convoluted destiny of this piece of furniture.
According to a chronological disorder, we discover that Erika has inherited the sofa that was once the scene of her birth as well as that of the dying days of her mother, the extravagant Susanna. Now the young woman, living in tight quarters, must find a way to get rid of the thing. What follows is a series of tentative approaches, to friends and to her lover, Ali, intermingled with scatty or zany flashbacks.
This hybrid novel, written just as the author completed the shooting of a movie, ran into a final bump in the road linked to the sudden death of actor Nicolas Granger, Hélèna Villovitch’s long-time friend. This painful event then became like the piece missing from the patchwork she had put together.
“Nothing more moving that this multi-form narrative which completes its cinematic version, and where she collects, with a unique talent, snapshots of life.” L’Obs.
“Tireless work of reflection on the memory and a sofa which stages with so much elegance as lightness a narrator in front of difficulties of the creation.” Les Inrockuptibles. |
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