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 Mailleux a grandi au Québec mais dans des circonstances qui restent peu claires elle s'est retrouvée en Allemagne à la vingtaine. She is now in her seventies and lives in Hamburg. She is a stage actress and begins to write and perform a show, the premiere of which is to take place two months later. Artistic creation is a central theme of the novel.

Un groupe d'amis orbite autour d'Odile : Dima, a Russian painter who has painted a series of tableaux inspired by an Apple Maps map in which Russia has disappeared; Virginie, her gallerist, a Frenchwoman who loves the tableaux but doesn't want to show them; Frédéric, a Frenchman like her, who has a library in which books are shelved to the ceiling. Il vient de se faire mettre à la porte par son propriétaire ; Babak, un médecin iranien à la retraite dont Odile est amoureuse. Since the pandemic, the group has regularly returned to a quay on the banks of a canal. Odile, Dima and Frédéric are poor, and they take advantage of this to go to the food station, which is not far away where you can eat for free. Ebo, an Ivoirian who works as a waiter at a pizzeria, wants to join the group.

Odile considers a friend who is not part of the group, a photographer and trans-American cinematographer, as her brother. She thinks of a Quebecois woman who lives in Rome and tells her amorous adventures by email as her sister.

A lady who registered a text before her death and asked her petit-fils to give it to a theater artist also plays a role in history.

Beyond the reflection on artistic creation and on the world she is trying to understand, the novel is a meditation on the time that passes and on the spirit of truth that does not pass. Odile's very particular view serves as a guide for the two.

L'autrice sur elle-même et sur le roman :

" Before I'm not bad at things without importance for the majority, I am someone who courts. I've been running since I stopped grimpering, which was my first passion. I walk most of the time without taking a single step, geographically speaking. My feet prefer to take me to the moons where the milestones that filter through the earth impose themselves on the view and sometimes break it. And then life is too long for a little peace and quiet. At the age I am, it's not scary to see things like that.

I've spent a good part of my life in theater performance halls, hoping that theater can change the world. Que l'art puisse le changer. It can't. Il arrives qu'il change des petites choses, plus tard. The world is then another and therefore it is a kind of malentendu.

However, the novel speaks of the desire to change more than the little things and therefore of the desire to gain a little bit in advance. So pis pour les illusions ! He speaks of many other things, also because creation is so glorious. Minimalism is rarely his first choice and this is my first novel. It speaks of poverty and of a society that is eating the riches it amasses by selling its flesh. Old story. Il parle d'amour, a old story as well, but one that remains mysterious until the last soupir. In passing, he talks about a few episodes from our time, which are not as legendary as many others that preceded them. The saga is a form of memory and humanity has a long memory.

The piece of theater that the main character, an alter ego, created could have seen the light of day in collaboration with Andre Vltchek if he had not died en route. The novel was inspired by the intransigence of his gaze and is dedicated to his memory.

A sequel is planned, the story is therefore incomplete, but it can be read very well regardless of what happens in the second volume. "