“Chance is a very beautiful thing”, by Philippe Jaenada, Mialet-Barrault, 496 p., €22, digital €15.
There is no suspense for the meeting: Philippe Jaenada’s readers know that it would be almost inappropriate to offer the writer a place other than the Bistrot Lafayette in Paris, where he has his habits and which he mentions in all his books. This neighbourhood refuge could have been one of the author’s “passwords”. Bistros occupy an important place in his life and in his work in general, and in his new novel, Informality is a beautiful thing.especially.
At the centre is a 1950s version of the Latin Quarter bar Chez Moineau, where Ed van der Elsken took photographs of very young people gathering there to spend their days hanging out, drinking, dreaming, loving each other. “sparrows”. Moved by these children of war (the parents of some had collaborated, others had been killed in Auschwitz), he tries to retrace the fate of the gang members and to try to understand the death of Jacqueline Harispe, known as “Kaky”, who jumped out of a hotel window in November 1953, at the age of 20. She had inspired Patrick Modiano. In the cafe of lost youth (Gallimard, 2007) and appeared briefly in In the spring of monsters (Mialet-Barrault, 2021).
This journey through time and through the archives is joined by a geographical journey, as the author intertwines the history of his research on “Sparrows” with that of a journey through the “edges” from Dunkirk to Dunkirk, passing through the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, the Alps, the Jura, Alsace… Each stage is punctuated by visits to local hotels and bars, as unmodern as possible, where you can sit and listen to the locals, drinking beers and whiskeys. This change of scenery does not prevent us from finding ourselves in the wide, fraternal and beautiful Chance… many of the specialties of the Jaenada house, among which stand out the humor, the melancholic tenderness and the obsessive precision. Summary while we have a drink or two.
Injustice
Philippe Jaenada was working “for a year” has Informality is a beautiful thing. when he discovered that the origin of “drop” Kaky’s death, which would lead to his death, was in a “little stupidity” of the young woman, which had earned her a stay in a reformatory and then in the prison of Fresnes (Val-de-Marne), from which she emerged transformed. She had been the victim of an injustice, like other characters of Philippe Jaenada before her, those innocent people to whom she strove to restore their honour posthumously: Pauline Dubuisson (The little femaleJulliard, 2015), Henri Girard (the snakeJulliard, 2017), Lucien Léger (In the spring of monsters). As if writing arose from a desire for reparation.
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