Literature Review

Florent Oiseau, vicissitudes without weariness

3 reading minutes

written by Quentin Perissinotto · November 14, 2023 · 0 comment

Florent Oiseau, vicissitudes sans lassitude

Quentin Perissinotto for Le Regard Libre

Here it is, a novel unlike any other of the new literary season! All that's missing is the story of a man grappling with life's disillusions, apathy and the mundane. All with a witty phlegm.

A forty-something lost man, a penniless writer and a barely disguised misanthrope, Laurentis is undermined by his break-up with Ana. On a whim, he hops on an Intercités train back to his native Dordogne, hoping to find inspiration for a romance novel. In the hope that Ana will read it and decide to get back together with him.

«Writing a novel to get my loved one back seemed to me as unlaudable as suicide blackmail, but I didn't know how to do anything else, it was all I could come up with.»

The romance of the freeway

How difficult it is to talk about this book! All that's missing is a text made up of very little, yet which says almost everything. Florent Oiseau seizes on the details of everyday life with sarcasm to ridicule situations, depicting a gallery of characters who are moving in their caricatured way, and catching memories on the fly to make them take root.

The novel's strength lies in its nonchalant style, deliberately melancholy, but often hilariously disillusioned. The rhythm is full of languor, the tone full of concealed ardor and carried by a narrator totally overwhelmed by life, dragging his spleen as much as his feet.

Laurentis is a background character, a blurred extra in the frame who suddenly finds himself thrust into the limelight, unprepared and unaware of what to do with it; according to his publisher, he's the best of all the uninteresting writers. Which makes for some absolutely burlesque interactions!

«My job required me to frequent railway stations, which turned me into something of a railway anthropologist, and my observation was clear: the ugliest travelers - departing from Paris - pass through Austerlitz. The Berry, Orléanais and Massif Central regions, as rich in quality as they are, have never produced many models. I looked at myself in the reflection of my carriage window, and I was no exception.»

Florent Oiseau writes in an inimitable way, feigning platitude to catch the reader off-guard: he's a footballer dribbling as he walks, a tennis player with a devastating slice, a disjointed curler aiming for perfection. At first glance, his language seems to have been patched up, but in reality it's as polished as marble, without a scratch on it.

«The drunken scenes didn't smell of alcohol, the sex scenes looked like dictation at a Rotary Club, and the rest turned out to be a kind of three-hundred-page manifesto to the following conclusion: love is hard.»

Subterfuge and intimate battles

From a lack of inspiration that turns into rambling, Florent Oiseau finds the pretext to sign a novel that speaks of sensations and feelings. The narrator, like the author, constructs a story in the hope of encircling passion and marking out the impulses of the heart.

All that's missing contains the grace of aptness, the nonchalance of failed leaks, the indolence of delayed evidence. It reads like the experience of a fall in slow motion: between floating and fatal crushing.