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ISBN13: 9782234075450
Publisher: Stock
Published: Nov 8 2021
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.41
Height: 0.34 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French
I was just wondering whether I should carry on waiting for the last train from Armentières or look for a hotel room in this small town blanketed in early snow, which was already turning grey and slushy, when she and her boyfriend came up to me. She must have known from my rather lost expression that now was the time to come into my life, that anything was possible, and she would see it through, right down to the icy shiver that I still often and inevitably feel.
She is Thérèse, he is Lucien, a couple whom life could never have brought together without the death of an aunt who bequeathed a property on the outskirts of Orchies, close to the motorway, on the edge of the fields. Fred, the narrator, is a seasonal worker who spends autumn nights on the northern plains at the wheel of a harvester, unearthing hectares of sugar beet with a head full of jazz melodies that convince him he'll be a great saxophonist one day, like his uncle Frédéric. And now he's trapped by this couple, gradually sucked into their lives and their nocturnal secrets, a prisoner in their ruined palace, and he should escape but he's already under the spell of their tentacle-like personalities...
With Motorway (and its blues and jazz soundtrack) Luc Lang gives us a novel whose outlandish language, characters and situations are as mesmerising as Thérèse and Lucien, and the thrum of the motorway itself, as it depicts a simple meeting that is a one-way ticket to adventure.
Luc Lang is the author of nearly a dozen novels, collections of short stories and essays on contemporary art and literature. These include Mille six cents ventres (winner of the 1998 Goncourt des Lycéens), La fin des paysages (2006) and Mother (2012).
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