Rights sold to Germany (Ullstein/Claassen), Korea (Munhakdongne), China (Yingpan Brother), Slovakia (Pectus), and Japan (Hayakawa)
Vincent drives fast. He has to see Geneviève, the woman he once loved, and who is now about to die. On the speedway, he starts to reminisce, reflecting on the events that broke their couple 15 years earlier. He thinks about Clara, the child they lost, whose body was never found, and of the never-ending pain that consumed their love. Geneviève faced the tragedy alone, keeping a record of the suffering in her diaries, as if the writing was her life-line. Vincent tried to forget. He fled. Yet they would always have this experience of the unbearable in common. When they meet again, Vincent finds a woman eaten away by pain and sadness, but also appeased, and ready to face the past. In the last gestures and words that Geneviève and Vincent share before her death, they find each other again, and bring back Clara, their little girl, through their memories. Time has come for Vincent to reconcile himself with life.
Puisque rien ne dure describes, affectingly yet with wonderful restraint, the distress experienced in the loss of a child. Laurence Tardieu gives a voice to a mother and a father to evoke a suffering that cannot be communicated; she shows the ineluctable separation of the couple, and how each person finds their own way to deal with pain. In this poignant tale, life and death, like shadow and light, cannot be dissociated.
Laurence Tardieu was born in Marseille in 1972. She is an actress and a writer. She has published two novels at Arléa: Comme un père (2002) and Le Jugement de Léa (awarded the Libraires Leclerc prize for best novel in 2004).