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Xavier Person |
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« Mes yeux collés à la vitre, je n’y vois bientôt que la nuit, avant de me tourner vers les voyageurs dans la lumière du wagon. Je pense en les regardant aux pages dont j’avais cru faire un livre. J’avais cherché à mieux y voir ce que je pressentais dans quelques regards, dans une expression qui me retenait, ou un simple geste. À chaque fois ils me touchaient, je n’aurais su dire en quoi, c’était si fugitif, cela tenait au peu que me racontaient ces personnes parfois, amies ou inconnues. Mais n’avais-je pas confondu ma vie avec la vie des autres ? Ne devrais-je pas me livrer plus franchement plutôt que de me cacher derrière leurs histoires ? » |
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The author encounters things said by people, things seen, and recalled memories, in the metro or the train, at work, on the street, gestures and portraits sketched, all are combined here in a serie of brief chapters. As friends or strangers confide in him, his desire to get a glimpse of the secrets of their lives ultimately leads him back to his own shadowy areas. These revelations spark a sense of anxiety in the face of various experiences of disappearing, like so many tiny personal flaws. With a kind of distance and yet with sensitivity, the author is attentive in the tiniest details, gradually becoming himself implicated in the patchwork of these narratives.
"At first, I thought of spume when talking about our lives something connects us, but it is a very thin partition that falls apart when one catches hold of it. Or else, one might say that in certain ways our lives resemble one anothers in intriguing coincidences, in any case they brush against one another. What does that mean ? A friend told me that from the window of his new apartment, he could see a man who lived in a wall and no longer had any desire to budge from there, and I wondered why this touched me. I kept coming back to this wall. It is the first piece of a puzzle whose separate parts I have begun to reassemble, to try to understand this story a little more clearly. A story ? What is it actually about ? Didn’t I think I was beyond its reach ? Hadn’t I dreamed of escaping myself, and the world ?"
“Xavier Person, in this brilliant first narrative, offers us an intimate journey of a great subtlety, where the poetry is distilled with a lot of delicacy. A remarkable text, with a great generosity, to discover absolutely.”
Page des Libraires |
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