“Report of certain facts”, by Yasmina Reza, Flammarion, 240 p., €20, digital €15.
A collection of fifty-four texts, all unpublished. Short, sinewy, thin as an athlete’s body, clear as crystal. One might wonder if the initial project was not to dedicate this work entirely to judicial reporting. The book is also dedicated to Pascale Robert-Diard, a legal columnist for Worldand Stéphane Durand-Souffland, who officiates in FigaroThese stories deal with both ordinary justice carried out in criminal courts and crimes tried in courts, forming a coherent whole. The other texts evoke autobiographical events.
We could write a novel about each case. The trial of Nicolas Sarkozy, who, during a phone call with his lawyer, became the improbable Paul Bismuth, who has since become as famous as the white wolf. That of Jean-Marc Morandini, who is criticised for his, to say the least, unhealthy exchanges with underage children and who utters, by way of explanation and apology, these phrases heard countless times in court: “ I never imagined this. I regret the consequences. » Well, let’s see, and we don’t even imagine that the raging ocean is liquid before it is thrown into the water. Yasmina Reza also attends the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who abandoned her daughter Adélaïde on the beach of Berck-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais) to be submerged by the tide. She deals with these offences and crimes without trying to stretch them in all directions to derive eternal truths.
Yasmina Reza also talks about the trial of Jonathann Daval, who murdered his wife, Alexia Fouillot, and then appeared for weeks in the media, crying, in the arms of the young woman’s parents, who now considered him a son. When questioned, he claims that the murder was the result of an argument and then that he doesn’t really know anything about it, that from now on everything is indifferent to him, that he doesn’t care about the sentence he will receive. And the trial for rape of Tariq Ramadan, since referred by the appeal court to the departmental criminal court. Not to mention these criminal hearings during which we judge the “ordinary domestic violence”. All the horror, all the misery of the world.
Little bursts of life
The rest of the book takes place mainly in Paris and Venice, where the author has an apartment. Venice, its clouds, its sun, its melancholy. White light from the zenith, orange from the twilight, black light from the night, if such a contradiction could ever exist. Reza gives us rare fragments of his daily life. Not pieces, but little bursts of life. The author does not like to confide, he even resists giving interviews. People close by, suspicious ones from a distance and then all these people you only see once or twice in your life. Some, with whom we exchange a few words, others with whom we start a conversation so personal that we will never see them again, and these atoms of the crowd with whom we pass in silence while taking a moment for others, long lost sight of.
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