Laurent Gaudé, a prolific author published by Actes Sud, if he began his career as a writer by writing plays
, is also a novelist translated into thirty languages. Cris (2001), La Mort du roi Tsongor (2002, Prix Goncourt des lycéens, and Prix des Libraires), Le Soleil des Scorta (2004, Prix Goncourt), Eldorado (2006), La Porte des Enfers (2009), Ouragan (2010), Pour seul cortège (2012), Danser les ombres (2015), and finally Écoutez nos dédefeats (2016) … his novels find all their sources in the contemporary extreme, to which are added the ruins of history, and the magic of legends.
Listen to our defeats, it is a story that spans the centuries. A story with multiple characters, a warrior who braves Rome, a general immersed in the Civil War, an archaeologist facing jihadist terror, a king deposed by fascism and the indifference of the powerful, a man of the French secret services confronted with his choices and called to improvise judge of a dissident counterpart. Each of their stories is different, and yet, they are animated by a common flaw : in the violence of the world, where to detect beauty, and continue to believe in Humanity?
Terribly current, this novel with existential questions leaves us with a bittersweet flavor, where melancholy is tinged with an astonishing evocative power. Like fragments of life, like the only things that remain in the dust of history, the stories of the characters follow one another, intertwine, and enter into correspondence. It is therefore a game of places and identities that is played out here, revealed with the usual subtlety and poetry of the language of Mr Gaudé.
A breathless novel
Very rhythmic, his story never ceases to oscillate between great slowness, and meteoric rises where heroism rubs shoulders with barbarism, where the night can sometimes be filled with love, sometimes the terrain of murder, where the passion for objects exhumed from the soil of History is replaced by the unbearable image of an old gentleman beheaded for this same love. The strength of this novel lies in the absence of Manichaeism, of judgment, because these men and women are all swept away, carried away by the crash of the world.
A reflection on time and memory
Stunned, the protagonists then become aware that the jaws of time grind everything, alive, stones, emotions, and that in the end, there remains only this diffuse feeling of unfinished, and defeat. Is everything doomed to start again, like the Nietzschean myth of the Eternal Return? Then arises the difficulty of continuing their role in the gears of time, or giving up and plunging into the nothingness of doubt, a choice that Mariam, Job, Hannibal, Haile Selassie, Grant, and Assem must become aware of, and decide.
Read this novel, for its beauty, and to try to put words on what is unpronounceable in our world. For "listen to our defeats, they say it together, with a kind of gentleness and voluptuousness, listen to our defeats, we were only men […] ". A good novel is a novel that does not leave unscathed, and this one can be counted among them.
"Listen to our defeats" by Laurent Gaudé or the tragedy of our stories
Article written by Julie Madiot
