TRYING TO LIVE
Under option in China, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK and Vietnam
“Before I actually met Sandrine Broussard, I imagined her in very subjective terms, based on what people had told me. To be honest, it doesn’t matter much how close I came to the truth. I saw this young woman distantly orbiting Bonnie Parker, gravitating towards her like a feebly glowing star, and I pictured her average height, blond, pretty, like Faye Dunaway in the film. Sandrine was the incongruous part of my world, unlike anything else, stubbornly unclassifiable.”
When the narrator finally meets Sandrine Broussard he is captivated by her magnetic personality, his diametric opposite. This young woman then describes her many tumultuous lives, all revolving around cons and underground dealings. But deep down she longs to stop being one of life’s “stowaways” and to find her place in the world. In order to “try to live”, we have to leave several versions of ourselves behind. Is that possible? And what price is there to pay for emerging from this tunnel?
Through this inverse doppelganger, the narrator tries to touch on something that has always evaded him, a detachment and apparent lightness to set him apart from the world and achieve something impossible.
Éric Faye is the author of novels and travelogues published by Stock. His works include Mes trains de nuit (2005), L’homme sans empreintes (2008) and Somnambule dans Istanbul (2013). His last novel, Nagasaki, won the 2010 Grand Prix du roman from the Académie française.