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Frédéric Ciriez |
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Cet été-là, Julie et sa fille Neko bronzent sur une plage de l’île du Levant. L’une dévore un manuel de mental coaching, l’autre est plongée dans un manga d’un genre un peu spécial. Sitôt quitté leur bulle de lecture, toutes deux vont se confronter à la sauvage et brûlante réalité.
Détournant les codes du développement personnel et du roman sentimental, Frédéric Ciriez en préserve l’apparente légèreté, non sans déconstruire – pour notre plus grand plaisir – les leurres de ces injonctions au bonheur et à la réussite individuelle.
The novel begins with the first chapter of a self-help manual, Mental coaching (Ma méthode, mes succès). Her nose plunged in this best-seller, Julie is sun bathing on a nudist beach on the Isle of Levant. Newly divorced, the buxom forty-something hopes to find the means to pull her life together in this book that offers an introduction to happiness. She forgets the presence of her only daughter, Neko. The physically ungainly teenager is also absorbed in a book, devouring the first volume of Bad Lovers Hackers, a Manga yaoi (for girls only) that appears to be a romance between young heroes, all of them masculine. In the second part of the novel, these two characters have occasion to compare the cocoons of their respective books with their immediate reality.
Through these two readers in the midst of summertime metamorphosis, Frédéric Ciriez examines the disturbing fantasies of a very contemporary Bovarysme.
“Brilliant and aggressive.” (Libération)
“A pleasant farce about the huge market and the madness of self-improvement.” (Le Magazine littéraire)
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