Option Paradis starts in May 2001. Nicolas Rubien and his cousin Louise Herdouin, also his lover, spend a few days in the house of the late Gabrielle Maudon, their grand-mother. Free from propriety and social hypocrisy, they evoke the family history, their childhood memories, their marriages and divorces, their love affairs.
Louise and Nicolas at in the margins of a paradise announced, with its specific values that shape individuals. Faced with the social mutations that put the system up-side-down, Nicolas is seized by the nostalgia as well as the horror of the past. Trained as an architect, and fascinated by utopists, he is convinced that the new world is not for him.
According to an anonymous thinker, in the 1950s Western society claimed it would establish, here and now, the paradise which would allow us to escape old determinisms. Nicolas describes this secular paradise, its elaboration and its contradictions.
As well as deconstructing the evolution of our contemporary world with skepticism and lucidity, François Taillandier also humorously recalls those simple truths that help to free us from an illusory social order.
From present to past, from one memory to another, La Grande intrigue revisits the genre of the social novel to recount the history of five generations in five volumes, of which Option paradis is the first.
François Taillandier is the author of Clandestins (prix Jean Freustié 1990), Les Nuits blanches (prix Roger Nimier 1992), Mémoires de Monte-Christo (Lgf), Des Hommes qui s'éloignent (Fayard), Aragon, 1897-1982 (Fayard), Anielka (Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française, Stock, 1999), N6 (Stock), Le Cas Gentile (Stock), and Où est ma langue ? (Flammarion).