« Je passe mon temps à voler des gens. Dans le métro, dans la rue, au café, sur la plage. Ce peut être une femme, un homme, un adolescent, une enfant, un couple… J’ai toujours un carnet et un stylo sur moi. Je tente de les deviner, aucun ne doit me rester étranger, je veux les garder, je finis par les inventer, ce que je nomme voler. »


Avec ces soixante-cinq récits brefs, Arnaud Cathrine capte les vies potentielles de celles et ceux qu’il croise, tout en renvoyant aux fantasmes de celui qui les regarde. J’entends des regards que vous croyez muets propose donc un jeu de miroirs entre ces inconnus propices à la fiction et l’autoportrait de l’auteur devenu à son tour un personnage à part entière.




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For years, an almost daily urge has compelled the author to “steal people”, at least, a brief episode of their existence. In the metro, the street, at a café, on the beach, he pursues a man, a woman, a teenager, a child, a couple, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Hidden in public or more familiar places, always with his little notebook, Arnaud Cathrine sketches them from life, or comes back to them later thanks to accumulated evidence of their presence, in situations that inspire daydreams even fiction.
Thus one can read the portrait of a grouch cashier at his supermar¬ket; a scene of lovers breaking up at the neighbouring table of a café as reinterpreted by his imagination; the early stages of a pick-up on a nudist beach at Arcachon; a gaze into a woman reading on the metro, the dreamed life-story of a fare-dodger in the train to Deauville; what one could initially take to be a tête-à-tête between a father and son in a restaurant but turns out to probably be a couple of lovers; the brief tailing of his mysterious next-door neighbour who is apparently a wandering soul of loneliness. Each character, seen through the eyes of Arnaud Cathrine, draws progressively the self-portrait of the writer. The people crossed become the mirror in which he is deposing his own desires and phantasies.




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‘‘ Arnaud Cathrine steals strangers as a musician makes his scales. ‘‘

Le Monde

‘‘ Arnaud Cathrine is perfect in annotation, precision, detail. Nothing escapes him.’’

Le Figaro