« Ce livre est comme un chien que j’ai rencontré une fois. Il y a des frissons, dedans c’est labyrinthique apparemment et infini comme dans un chien. Il y a des races chez ces animaux qui, de chiens de combat, évoluent vers chiens de compagnie. C’est un peu mon parcours. Mon livre ruminé, il a tout d’un cerveau. C’est une chose sérieuse et en même temps pas du tout. »


Gaëlle Obiégly nous immerge dans l’esprit chaotique d’un homme, Daniel, recueilli dans une communauté survivaliste financée par madame Chambray, richissime mécène. Devenu le scribe et le cobaye de cette femme manipulatrice, il use des rares temps morts de sa liberté surveillée pour s’épancher dans un carnet de bord clandestin, celui qui fournit la matière brute et poétique de ce livre.




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The narrator, 37-year-old Daniel, a former parking-attendant, suffers from memory disorders and emotional disturbances sometimes paranoid. He has been taken in by a strange community established by a wealthy benefactress, Chambray, where recruits are trained to ward off catastrophes that threaten humanity. We learn that they are subject to a more or less clandestine programme combining ascetic discipline, gymnastics and pharmaceuticals, run by the billionaire patroness who is ready to squander her fortune on this project of a colony where the rare survivors of the human race will be preserved.
The novel borrows its background from the contemporary SF, inspired by deviations linked to neuroscience. Some of the guinea-pigs have had a cerebral implant installed which conditions them to obey except on Sundays. Thus, once a week, the narrator can reveal to us his chaotic interiority. Beyond his fate as a test subject, Daniel has a literary role to play. Chambray wants him to write a hagiography covering her career as an international businesswoman, glorifying her voracious ambition. Seen from this angle, the novel takes us further and further, meandering through degrees of mental and physical manipulation, as though the catastrophe that all await throughout the book were not some nuclear or climactic apocalypse, but rather a future of slavery of this man-machine.



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‘‘ The work of Gaëlle Obiégly asserts itself, definetely, as one of the most confusing and impactful of the contemporary landscape, as it proves to be profoundly active in the consciousness of the reader. ‘‘
Le Monde