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Precautionary Principle

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Pascal is a married man, the father of two children. He works as an asset manager for a financial company that is about to merge with an Italian conglomerate. Staff reductions are announced, giving rise to a savage competition amongst colleagues. One of them, Lionel Ruszczyk, chooses Pascal as a scapegoat. He confounds and humiliates this peaceful family man with relentless tales of his perverse sexual life. Pascal hardly needs new reasons to stress, for if relationship with his 11-year old daughter Manon is wonderful, communication proves much more difficult with his 16-year old son Julien, who is going through a wild phase.
At the same time, Pascal is sensitive to the precautionary discourses that fill the media: from anti-terrorist policies to anti-smoking campaigns to new measures to fight juvenile delinquency and the impact of the excess of sugar in one’s diet, he espouses all the schemes aiming to eradicate risk. The “zero-risk” approach has slowly become an obsession.
While demonstrating in Paris, Julien gets beaten up. As a result, his behaviour becomes increasingly disturbed and his father worries. There are tales of adolescent boys massacring their families almost every week: is it possible that Pascal’s own unmanageable son could become a threat to his family? Should Pascal not, in this case, apply the precautionary principle?
Precautionary principle is a brilliant work, the book of a young author who is reflecting on his own time. Uncompromising, yet often very funny, this novel confirms Jung’s ability to emulate the best of contemporary Anglo-Saxon literature.

Matthieu Jung was born in Nancy and lives in Paris. He has published chronicles and short stories in many magazines and on Internet. Le vague à l’âme, his first novel, was published in 2007 with Scali.