Hard weather

Perhaps it should have appeared earlier, in the heart of winter, this little book that risks going unnoticed at the late onset of summer. Guy Verville’s third work—following the novella _Le Putain_ (Guernica, 1991) and the remarkable novel _Crever mon fils_ (Les Herbes rouges, 1993)—_La Vie dure_ presents itself as a narrative but reads like a novel. Everything takes place over a single night, as the storm of the century rages in the sky and through the city streets. A writer stops in a café, studies faces, listens to fragments of conversation and writes. Inner storms are unleashed.

Guy Verville’s prose is gripping, poignant and breathless. His short sentences, which at first seem to lack fluidity, stop and start again until they become a rhythm, a train of thought. We are inside the mind of a man who, unable to bear his suffering any longer, has decided to die and put an end to the boredom. Armed with a gun, he intends to take advantage of the anonymity afforded by the storm on the mountain. He has prepared and anticipated everything except the animal’s survival instinct. “His arms still pointed toward the sky, he begins to cry. His body has won, costing him a precious bullet and even more precious time. He had not considered the body’s resistance.”

There are six stories, six individual dramas unfolding here, interspersed with the writer’s wanderings through a world where reality surpasses fiction. A sick old man enters a bookshop and disturbs a dreamy bookseller who never imagined he would have to assist someone in dying in the middle of a storm. But the old man is strange and has much to teach him; he will leave the bookseller changed. A wounded woman briefly interrupts their encounter, then flees. “How people suffer, my God, how people suffer,” the old man has said.

Elsewhere, in a living room, a woman smokes excessively. She is waiting for her husband’s death, for her liberation. The agony drags on. The author creates an atmosphere of suffocation, waiting and anguish. Time passes heavily. All of life has lost its meaning. In a prison, two men love each other without saying so. The wounded, raped woman haunts the streets before climbing the mountain to lick her wounds in turn.

As its title suggests, _La Vie dure_ is no cheerful tale. Yet through these stories of everyday horror, told by Guy Verville with rawness and poetry, hope breaks through—the dream of a better future, life enduring after the storm.

From the outset, we are plunged into the characters’ distress, their hardships and conflicting emotions, only to find them facing a choice each time: to live or to cease to exist. Rather than descend into melodrama and wallow in it, the author concludes by sharing the solutions to each problem. Everything comes down to a love of life. One never tires of reading these deeply moving stories that resemble us so closely. _La Vie dure_ is a vivid portrait of people caught in the storms of existence and emotion. It is also an admirable hymn to life.