Guillaume Carayol and Stéphane Sénégas invite you to discover Lucien, sweeper and magician in the 1960s. However, this initial poetry becomes a dark chronicle. Discover how the two authors succeed in this metamorphosis.
A sweet brute
Lucien, edited by Delcourt, was born in the spirit of Guillaume Carayol and Stéphane Sénégas. The latter also ensures the drawing and became known by the ten volumes of Anuki, a story for the youngest but Lucien is not at all made for children.
The first pages evoke Jacques Prévert in his poetic vision of everyday life. In October 1966 in the south of the France, Lucien, sweeper of the park, has a super power: the discreet young man makes the leaves fly by his broom in a gesture of kung fu. The rest of the time, he loves a florist without daring to confess to her. More strangely, he feels for a violinist statue. This simple life fulfills him even if other adults despise him or make fun of him. Indeed, Lucien is an atypical adult who seems to have limited intelligence. Far from stigmatizing him, the book shows how everyday life is transformed by the gaze of a character apart. Shocked, Lucien vomited in the face of this attack. Hypersensitive, he is afraid of a poodle and does not know how to react. He flees but, if cornered, he reacts violently. Through these crises, the book leaves naivety. We do not understand everything at first. Who is this sweeper and why doesn't he speak? But, over the pages, all the questions are answered by a structured and tortuous scenario because each page reveals many surprises.
Who is the child?
Lucien gradually reveals different characters, each of whom hides his sensitivity in a harsh world: a Spanish bar owner seems boorish but has a heart of gold, a grocer is very tactile … The book mostly revolves around the relationship between a child and a child adult. By chance, a boy, Paul, surprises Lucien waltzing the leaves. Unlike adults, he does not judge him but admires his genius. Paul is also mocked in class for refusing to take off his cap. Starting from common point, the boy offers to be his friend even if Lucien does not know this notion. If the child accepts the difference, he is not naïve because he grumbles when Lucien forgets it. Without being able to give you the key, the switch halfway through the book changes all our perceptions about Paul and Lucien. The script takes the narrative to a dark vision of humanity.
To illustrate all this complexity, Stéphane Sénégas demonstrates the very wide range of his talents. For the very solar beginning, the line is very thin. We can think that it was made with pen with Indian ink. This purity is reinforced by the absence of color. However, the black becomes foggy over the pages illustrating Lucien's thoughts jostling in his head or the wickedness of the bar pillars. It incorporates tasks in the drawing showing the suffering of the main character. Sénégas switches to pastel for a night landscape in the city. Through blurring, an intimate scene can be explicit without pornography. Even if the layout is most often organized around a waffle iron, it varies. Senega imitates the window of a van making the reader a voyeur.
Lucien is a gamble for Stéphane Sénégas who leaves the shores of children's stories and approaches a more adult and complex continent. The book begins as a poem by Prévert but ends as in the film La ligne verte. Lucien is also a drawing lesson by alternating finesse and blur depending on the subject.
On the site, find other human chronicles such as My neighbor is Indonesian and Memories on the run.
