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 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 play, the premiere of which is to take place two months later.
Every week, she meets up with her friends on a quay on the canal. As Frédéric and Dima are poor, all three of them take advantage of it to go to the food station, which is not far away where you can eat for free. Frédéric is French, he has a bookshop where books are shelved to the ceiling. He is about to be taken in by his owner. Dima is Russian and a painter, he intends to create a series of tableaux inspired by a map from Apple Maps in which Russia has been disparaged. Virginie, his gallerist, who is also French, loves the tableaux, but she doesn't want to exhibit them. Babak is a retired Iranian doctor with whom Odile is in love. At the beginning of the novel, Ebo, an Ivoirian who works as a waiter at a pizzeria, wants to join them.
Two other friends of Odile's play an important role in the story: Michel, a transgender German photographer and cinematographer, whom she considers her brother, and Sylvie, a Quebecois living in Rome, who recounts her amorous adventures to her by email and whom she considers her sister.
The creation of the spectacle Odile is working on: the work of writing, the text itself which takes shape bit by bit, the répétitions with the comedians and actresses, the work with other members of the group, the relationships with theater are the main theme of the novel, which has no history in the traditional sense of the term. Other themes are linked to this theme: Odile's love for Babak in the first place, the words that a woman recorded before her death and that she asked her son to give to a theater artist, and a traumatic story that is spared in the novel but is never explicitly told. Odile is never lost in her reflections, there is a question of artistic creation, of art in general, of the body, of the world in which we live, often without seeing it, of Odile's imaginary world as well. La vérité l'obsède. Elle and her companions are mal enlignés avec les valeurs des gens qu'on dit biens, qui croient l'être surtout, et il est probable qu'ils se foutent de ce que ces gens pensent d'eux.
Le roman est dédié à la mémoire d'Andre Vltchek avec qui la pièce de théâtre à laquelle travaille Odile aurait pu voir le jour, s'il avait vécu plus langtemps. Odile is an alter ego of the author, but she is not her double. Andre Vltchek was a cinéaste, journalist de guerre, philosopher and auteur, he wrote several essays that are as passionate as they are virulent. 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 writes and performs is scheduled for 16 June. If a sequel to the novel sees the light of day, the work on the show will resume its course from where it left off, but due to the acceleration announced in the next chapter, the wind has changed a little.
Le titre de la pièce, L'heure des barbares, donne son titre au livre.
