Rights sold to Spain (Periferica)
No Present begins with a hangover. It’s 1990, the narrator has just passed his baccalaureat and is puking up the 80s, a decade characterised by Margaret Thatcher and demonstrations, the stranglehold of the French stock exchange and François Mitterand’s election… while the media are starting to reverberate with the fall-out of economic warfare. He also has flashbacks of his childhood in a high-rise council estate in Vaulx-en-Velin with a mother who was among the student protestors in 1968 and who welcomed her lovers and her militant friends into their grim apartment. She insisted that her children gave an ideological explanation for their every decision, and claimed to regret not having abortions because she couldn’t know how badly the world would turn out.
What, then, can he do with his life now, against this background of violence and its dubious inheritance? Become a “wage slave”, choose terrorism or give up on any social status and take a leap in the dark?
Along with other disorientated youths from mediocre homes who have all decided they won’t “step into line”, the narrator sets up a collective, Tabula rasa, in the middle of the Croix-Rousse area of Lyon, squatting in a workshop where they each invent their own world with no limitations or responsibilities, a place that is meant to be devoted to creative work. But this artistic project descends into a massive joint-smoking session that Lionel Tran describes with chilling lucidity. The author gives us a gallery of impressively realistic portraits, not sparing us a single failing, a single neurosis afflicting each of his protagonists. The strikingly jumpy and haunted writing is the sort that leaves indelible images and, to the reader’s astonishment, it recreates the drowning of a generation not even aware of the tragic and comic energy radiating from them.
In this nihilistic environment, the narrator forces himself to write every day, trying to tell the untellable, hovering on the brink of insanity, until – at the very last moment – he realises that the absolute he’s been trying to find doesn’t even exist. In order to extract himself from this destructive set-up, he bears witness to it, coining a post-punk-type dialect of panic and survival, and giving us a disturbing glimpse of a world that eats its own children alive.
Lionel Tran is an outsider. He has worked as an alternative journalist, and has written screenplays for what was referred to as the movement for independent strip cartoons. After working for a printing company and for a firm of building managers for sixteen years, he now runs writing workshops. He lives in Lyon.
L'auteur
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