“Hotel Roma”, by Pierre Adrian, Gallimard, 192 p., 19.50 euros, digital 13 euros.
A recent resident of the Villa Medici and now living in Rome, Pierre Adrian affirms his taste for Italy with Hotel Romathe beautiful story dedicated to Cesare Pavese (1908-1950). Revealed in 2015 by The Pasolini Trail (Ecuador), this thirty-something sports fan (he is a columnist for the The team), published several novels that already suggested a close friendship with the Piedmontese writer: The good boys (Equateurs, 2020) borrowed, for example, its epigraph from beautiful summerby Pavese (Gallimard, 1955), and Let those who are far away return (Gallimard, 2022) took its title from profession of living (Gallimard, 1958), the famous posthumous diary published after the writer’s suicide… It is not surprising, therefore, to see him embark on “the Pavese path” today, thanks to a narrative journey – almost a pilgrimage – to the birthplaces of a work.
Was this trip planned a long time ago, as a debt owed to a beloved writer? “I don’t have the same relationship with Pasolini as with Pavesethe author explains to “World of Books”. I was looking for a “soul leader” in the first one and found a companion in the second one. Let those who are far away returnMy previous book bears witness to this through the title, but also through the theme of return, so important to Pavese: the return to childhood, to the home, and the questioning of what it means to have a homeland. At first I particularly wanted to be in Pavese’s books, I could almost say that I wanted to become one of his characters. And then, while I was working on the texts, I had the desire to go and see the hills of Piedmont, to walk around Turin…”
Therefore, it is in Turin that Hotel Romain the room where the writer committed suicide and where the story is immediately confronted with a certain mythology of suicide, without being uniformly determined: literary research will instead be used, following the chronological order of a journey, to highlight various aspects of the writer’s fate, before returning, inevitably, to “Pavese’s last summer”.
“I am not fascinated by suicide”
Pierre Adrian, whose vein is deliberately elegiac, sometimes at the risk of a certain coquetry, certainly tries to resist a kind of power of death, whose sombre weight is not absent from his book, even if he denies it: “Of course, Pavese attracts me, but I am not fascinated by suicide, even though my book begins there. And then there are certain texts that I talk about, like The moon and the fires [Gallimard, 1965] EITHER The beautiful summer, youth and extraordinary energy to convey that from which the writer felt isolated… Hotel RomaIn this sense, it is not a book about suicide, it is a book about a writer who ended up committing suicide. »
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