In a movement of both lightness and rapidity, David Thomas links together scattered fragments of people’s lives, those of love, of friendship and work, and which result in a pile-up of consequences. He presents moments of epiphany, of a hundred encounters, creating a profusion of décors and scenes, and also of emotions and dramatic tensions.
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The little stories about literature, sleeping pills and lustful sporting bets are all so many opportunities to intertwine numerous registers of language and styles of expression. The writing keeps to a fine line, walking a path along a narrow ridge, which avoids any monotony for the reader.
Each chapter is a microfiction constructed around a subtle balance between comedy, satire, and caustic irony, thanks to short and sharp sentences. Written in the first person, these microfictions are like wandering discussions on this and that.
That revealing fraction of a second
Thomas rapidly places his characters in the middle of a décor. Between just a couple of lines, a tiny something suffices for everything to change dramatically. The singular humour of the author plays upon these reversals.
Thomas never dwells on the psychology of the characters. He prefers action, the detail or instant which reveals them. He looks for what escapes in that fraction of a second, revealing humanity in its bad faith, stripped of pretence. He hunts down human contradictions, what there is behind ideologies, and the talk that is mere façade.
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For example, there is the friend “who, three years ago, decided to leave civilisation, to break off from the consumer society and this vain rat race which leads only to dissatisfaction”. He escapes to a forest in the Vosges and ends up buying a 4x4. Thanks to this expeditious narration, the multiplying series of playlets gives the ordinary an appearance of the extraordinary.
Partout les autres ("Everywhere the others") proves itself to be, rather than a long joke, an air bubble that explodes in the face. Thomas has a light, but also piercing, view of the contemporary world. Far from being superficial or trivial, this collection of short stories helps one to find the seemingly impossible lightness that we so miss, by placing our world, with wit, at a distance.
He debunks it, as in this line about writing a poem: “It suffices to start a new line from time to time, to remove punctuation, and that makes it a poem.” Beneath the apparent humour, Thomas poses profound questions, about literature, human relations, and our finiteness: “I have seen the moment when I was going to finish my life, like slipping up on the skin of a kiwi.”
'Moments of eternity'
His wit and consummate art of the repartee, and dialogue, brings nuance to human relations, and for our great benefit: “It’s not so much that the level of debate is lowering, it is that nuance, pertinence, subtlety have become inaudible.”
The force, and perhaps even the flaw, of Partout les autres is that Thomas’s writing is in reality situated in an extremely political field: his capacity to create narratives in the present, where it is for each of us to form an opinion, leaves the reader with the responsibility of thinking through the situation.
Thomas presents us with moments of eternity, caught between laughs and tears, a work so deservedly rewarded with the 2023 Goncourt prize for short stories.
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- Partout les autres by David Thomas is published in France by Les Éditions de L’Olivier, priced 18 euros.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse