Projet de livre
Quelques lieux :
le quai au bord du canal
la Food Station
la salle de répétitions
la cuisine d'Odile
le quartier d'Odile
la maison de Babak
Synopsis :
Odile grew up in Quebec, but under circumstances that remain unclear, she ended up in Germany in her twenties. She is now in her sixties and lives in Hamburg. She is a theater director and is beginning to write and rehearse a play that is set to premiere two months from now.
Every week, she meets up with five friends on a pier along a canal. Like her, Frédéric and Dima are poor; like her, they stock up on the way at the nearby Food Station. Frédéric is French; he owns a bookstore where books are piled haphazardly up to the ceiling. Customers are few and far between. Dima is Russian and a painter; he has just completed a series of paintings inspired by an Apple Maps map in which Russia has disappeared. Virginie, her gallery owner—also French—likes the paintings, but she doesn’t want to exhibit them. Babak is a retired Iranian doctor; Odile is in love with him. At the beginning of the novel, Ebo, an Ivorian who works as a delivery driver at a pizzeria, joins them.
Two other friends of Odile’s play an important role in the story: Michel, a transgender German photographer and filmmaker whom she considers her brother, and Sylvie, a woman from Quebec who lives in Rome, who tells her about her romantic adventures via email and whom she considers her sister.
The creation of the play Odile is working on—the writing process, the script itself, which gradually takes shape, rehearsals with the actors and actresses, collaboration with the other members of the troupe, and her relationship with the theater—is the main theme of the novel, which has no plot in the traditional sense. Other themes intertwine with this central one: Odile’s love for Babak; the words a woman recorded before her death and asked her grandson to give to a theater artist; and a trauma whose story is scattered throughout the novel but is never explicitly recounted. Odile constantly loses herself in her reflections, which, of course, deal with artistic creation, art in general, the body, the world in which we live—often without seeing it—and Odile’s imaginary world as well. She is obsessed with the truth—her truth, which is not always that of the so-called “respectable” people. People who, above all, believe themselves to be so.
The novel is dedicated to the memory of Andre Vltchek, with whom the play Odile is working on might have come to fruition had he lived longer. Odile is the author’s alter ego, but she is not her double. Andre Vltchek was a filmmaker, war correspondent, philosopher, and author; he wrote several essays that are as passionate as they are scathing. He is one of the characters in the novel—the only one who is real.
The story told in the novel takes place in April 2022, and the premiere of the play that Odile is writing and rehearsing is scheduled for June 16. If a sequel to the novel is published, work on the play will resume where it left off. But because of the acceleration foreshadowed in the penultimate chapter, the situation will have changed somewhat.
The title of the play, *L’heure des barbares*, is also the title of the book.
