The man she shouldn't love

Agathe Ruga plunges us into a novel that oscillates between desire and despair, between the intensity of emotions and emotional emptiness. Ariane, a married woman in her thirties and mother of three, one day sets her sights on a young bartender in the village: the damage is done, and the implosion has already begun. She falls intensely in love with him—a man who is her exact opposite and, above all, who couldn’t care less about this neurotic mother. Driven by the irrationality of the heart, she embarks on a frantic, ridiculous, and frivolous pursuit to attract—if only for a moment—the attention of the heartthrob. In keeping with the theme of this month’s feature, let’s briefly sketch a portrait of Agathe Ruga’s book *The Man I Wasn’t Supposed to Love* in three words.

Passion

This book is about a wild, one-sided passion—a dead end into which Ariane throws herself, only to run headlong into walls she hopes are as cracked as she is.

Dédésir

If The Man I Wasn't Supposed to Love is a novel about desire; it is also—and perhaps above all—a novel about the gaping chasm created by the absence of desire, which Agathe Ruga calls «dédésir.» Indeed, if the narrator throws herself headlong into a doomed fling, it is because she is treated as a stranger by her husband, who has completely neglected her. This disappearance of the flesh, this dematerialization of touch, is the spark that will ignite the great blaze of her downfall.

Lover

As the story unfolds, we discover that Ariane isn’t the only woman in the family to have fallen prey to the torments of extramarital affairs. Years earlier, her mother had already had a lover. The two stories intertwine and echo one another, perhaps in an attempt to find some logic in what seems illogical.

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Photo credit: © Quentin Perissinotto for Le Regard Libre

You have just read an article from our print edition (Le Regard Libre No. 88).