Born in 1968, a young man decides to write to his mother. It is an act of liberation – his true primal scream in fact – that will allow him to throw a few home truths in the face of the woman who brought him into the world. Daughter of a solidly bourgeois family, revolutionary wasn’t everyone? in 68, and perfectly PC and hypocritical – isn’t it the same thing? – ever since, she was a woman who was unable to love her son, who then watched her grow old more than she had watched him grow up. In the absence of a father whom he’ll meet again one day, during a memorable scene of violently combined reunion and adieux, the narrator grew up with a rage and a desire for the absolute that only our era of morally cheap comfort can heat up so well in a romantic soul.
Disgusted by demagogy erected as the sole political principle, our angry young man reacts virulently to the slouching, self-satisfied world his elders – especially his mother – have bequeathed him. Enlisting for Bosnia – Sarajevo was distant enough to die honorably, far from Paris and a life where you die of boredom – purges him of his dreams of heroism and of the sorrow caused him by the young woman who married his vilified half-brother.
Upon his return, he finds in nationalist temptations fuel for the fire that French politicians no longer know how to light in the country’s heart. He gets over it, too stubbornly un-gregarious to go to bed with a populism whose noble ideas get all tangled up when they are manipulated by a desire for power.
Love will find him, and allow him to fulfill his irresistible, impertinent desire for beauty and greatness. The letter to his mother closes with a harsh sort of no hard feelings, while the book itself closes with a brief missive, a post scriptum addressed to the narrator’s soon-to-be-born daughter, a note of optimism. A breath of fresh air has swept away his incendiary demons; blowing at his back, it pushes him forwards.