| Christophe Siébert, murder, drugs and the Russian megalopolis

Mertvecgorod, fictional city-state, turn of the millennium. Five teenagers on the bangs of society take to drugs and punk soundtracks on a daily basis to forget the doldrums in which they live. The murder of Valentina, a transvestite neighbor, will reshuffle the cards of their daily lives.

Winner of the Prix Sade 2019 for his novel The metaphysics of meat, Christophe Siébert has since embarked on a trashy epic with a Russian accent. After Images of the end of the world and Feminicid (which were the Mertvecgorod Chronicles), this year the French writer publishes Valentina, starting a new cycle: Half a century of shit. These violent, absurd works showcase different aspects of his world, from oligarchic politicians to downtrodden ordinary people.

Homesickness

An original literary construction, the author narrates the daily life of a city-state, Mertvecgorod, landlocked between Russia and Ukraine. This place, a giant open-air dump, combines all the absurdities of the former USSR with the invasive violence of modern capitalism. As a result, the population is hungry, cold and addicted to any substance that offers a brief escape. This is the world of five punk teenagers who, far too soon, are confronted with the horrors of everyday life.

«It seems that in other sectors, things are different, that teachers are respected, that they listen, that they learn things, even useful things that will later enable them to have a job and a decent salary. Such considerations make them laugh, such nonsense, you bet, a trade, a salary, if they're still alive at thirty it'll be a miracle. To learn what? To become a slave to the oligarchs? Thank you very much. Better to die with a gun in your hand or a syringe in your arm. Besides, their heroes don't talk about anything else, the punks, the rappers, the goths. Fuck up as much as we can, spit in the soup, what soup, motherfucker? We don't even have a plate. As for the table, the bailiffs are taking it away right now.»

In this bleak, lucid account of their lives, the five heroes come face to face with a violence so ordinary that they themselves have to feed it, or risk being left out in the cold. But with death knocking at their door, what's left to do to prevent the situation from degenerating even further? Wrongly accused of a crime, how far will they go to get the truth out and survive? Siébert tackles these questions with a distinctive sense of prose.

Perversion and slang

The novel is written in a very oral language, peppered with slang, Russian and neologisms, making Mertvecgorod extremely lively, almost palpable through a few TV screens broadcasting the horrors taking place there every evening. In fact, the city is divided into sectors, the «rajon»And if school seems to be the usual way out, students are far too aware of their lives to hope to get out of it that way. And if school seems to be the usual way out, students are far too aware of their lives to hope to get out of it that way. So they prefer to dance, do drugs and get as drunk as they can before the end comes, in a brutal headlong rush that forces them to grow up too fast.

The novel abandons the chronicle of manners to become a true crime novel, with dirty realism and a killer on the prowl. Defying clichés and expectations, Christophe Siébert delivers a poignant, very violent, sometimes funny, but also touching tale of a fictional world so close to our own that it overturns the over-encumbered codes of the modern French novel.

Write to the author: mathieu.vuillerme@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © DR

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Christophe Siébert 
Valentina
Au Diable Vauvert 
2023 
260 pages 

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