A large society portrait. A novel that sets out, from the margins of society into the centre of our political crisis: How can it be that the right-wing populists in Europe are so successful? That so many feel lost to be? Well, look at the fictional small town of salvation a long time, as was laid in the nineties, the basis for the current Disaster.
“later your children”, however, is not a political novel, which throws his figures in social political theories such as coats that are too big. Nicolas Mathieu remains close to its young characters, Hacine, Steph and Anthony, four scorching hot summer, 1992, 1994, 1996, in the end, everything runs on the world Cup final in ’98, the brief euphoric high between in the large decline. Suddenly a “We on flicker”, but the next Morning, only the plastic waste is left.
Anthony is 14. His body is a hormonal pressure chamber on the other side of the lake there is a nudist beach, he have to go there and swipes with his Cousin in a canoe. As you arrive over there, it’s not true, with the naturist, but at least you can find two girls, Steph and Clem, slender, with a ponytail, somehow much cooler than the two dumb, Horny guys.
Subtle differences at the lake
Pierre Bourdieu’s subtle differences, but not in the centre of Paris, but on a nameless lake. Anthony can sense these differences without being able to name them, the sovereignty of the girl, her movements, the clothes. “He had it not in words, but it had for him a peculiar impression of guilt, inadequacy, shabbiness.”
On the same evening there’s a Party. Anthony and his Cousin sneaking the Moped of Anthony’s father, a choleric alcoholic, at the end of the Party it is gone, stolen by Hacine, the son of a Moroccan. The encounter with Steph is going to have a year, in vain, desire for a result. And the Mofaklau will put enmity in a marriage, destroy, violence, prison, suicide. Hacine will have to go to Morocco. At the end, but it’s like in Monopoly, all back on, but unfortunately, without money.
Anthony, Steph, and Hacine. Four Summer. Six Years. 442 large format pages. You have to bring when you read patience, the author Nicolas Mathieu leaves the dull, small-town boredom to just take a look. The whole valley is dull like an eviscerated animal. Everyone knows each other, healing a long time of daily life, such as a Parking lot, monotonous, gray, and empty acts like a built in life’s cul-de-SAC, through the wild growth of Childhood has laid the tar of a link of Coolness.
The employment office, you come to the retired steel worker with terms such as Soft Skills and customer satisfaction.
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But while you think when you read, now come on, sets the Whole in motion, like a heavy train that takes slow ride to ride then, but across the whole country and a decade. These couple of months, these are the nineties, this barren town, this is France, and every Frenchman will be in healing a long time to conquer the fictional name of the small town, the real Hayange in the vicinity of the German-Luxembourg-thinking the border, one of the first cities where the Front National has managed the mayor’s office.
Anthony, Steph, and Hacine grow up in a world that no longer exists. The anecdotes of the parents are similar to rusty as the steel factory, which used to have all the work and now, like a dinosaur skeleton perched above the spectacular valley.
Anthony’s father Patrick has worked here at the oven. Now he stands in line at the Time, if he’s lucky, he may fill up vending machines for drinks, but he hates the ridiculous clothes for the company, “the T-Shirt and the jacket of Districan, the was still. But this bad end cap seat in the Corporate Design, red and supposedly adjustable, since it stopped for him”. He leads the war against the cap, representing his frustrations about a time that you come to him with the labour office, with terms such as Soft Skills and customer satisfaction.
The National Front is the rage milking
Anthony sees the pathetic hopelessness of his family, “they were dismissed, divorced, cheated, and got cancer. They were pretty normal and everything else was not anyway out of the question. So the families like plants grew on the ground out of anger.” The Front National will be milking this anger soon, such as toxic milk. Mathieu is usually very close to these young people, the beginnings of self never really get beyond dull to Understand. But again and again he zooms out of the murky thoughts of a semi-strong Problems after a high-top, in the bird’s-eye view. That is the strength and the Trick of this book.
Harry Angstrom, the main character in John Updikes Rabbit tetralogy, is basically blind to his own fate, and yet to be formulated behind his back the last valid rates over the empty everyday life of the middle class in the age of consumerism.
Nicolas Mathieu is a soul mate of Edouard Louis and Didier Eribon.
Nicolas Mathieu got for this novel, in 2018, the Prix Goncourt. Because he runs some sort of literary basic research to the advancement of the cruel populism. On the other, because he can thanks to his description of the accuracy of a decade, the rise of the music and the Slang on the technocrats talk to chains, brands, drug distribution channels.
The two Translators, Lena Müller and André Hansen have to give the tremendously well in German again, only in the youth long-one wonders, sometimes, if you have not sold out but a two decades. As of 1994, each other “dude”?
Nicolas Mathieu is a soul mate of Edouard Louis and Didier Eribon. Like you, he wants to have a world-to-come word, which is normally hidden most of the time. As he himself comes from a very humble background, from Epinal, a small town in Lorraine, and grew up in the empty Scenes of the former economic miracle. Like you, he knows the brutal mechanisms of Choice of the French school system, which still sticks to the fiction of the Republican equality.
Only creates the Bounce
The Only thing that unites the young people in his novel, is the desire of healing a long time to get out. But only Steph will make the Jump, first in a Parisian cadre, from there, the life lies before you like a glittering promise. Anthony and Hacim crawling, each according to his own botched escape attempt, in healing for a long time. What remains, is, as it says in the last sentence, “the gentle anxiety of belonging.”
Nicolas Mathieu: As, later, their children. Roman. From the French by Lena Müller and André Hansen. Hanser, Munich, 2019. 448 p., approximately 36 Fr.
Created: 29.10.2019, 13:30 PM
