Although Falaise is his fourth novel, it is the first time I have discovered Guy Verville. The subject of the book attracted me, four children raised in the utopia of sexual liberation, who are coming home after fifteen years away for their father's funeral. Everyone discovers that it is not easy to make peace with their past.
Serj, Yvonne, Heloise and Xavier had "combative parents, jouisseurs, artists and especially grotesque".
André and Diane raised these four children without knowing how to love them. They let perverse demons lurk around, lies infiltrate the four walls and truths hang "in the locked cupboards".
As a child, Xavier examined his parents through the keyhole; he saw too much of André and Diane "to admire, understand or love them. As for the others, childhood was a decoy, a bad thought.
André's will states that his assets were placed in a trust. All those who claim to be his children, and who hope to get something, will have to undergo a DNA test. And the author adds that "hatred and love form a confused string of DNA".
Hatred and love are constantly echoed in this finely crafted novel. The author sometimes seems to describe how a character learns to "homogenize his bitterness".
We often hear that tomorrow is another day, that we have to take that "sixty minutes at a time, and if possible, a shot of gin every 15 minutes!"
Guy Verville's style plays on several registers: sarcastic, philosophical, poetic, erotic. He writes that André "preferred to travel, enlightened and guided by drugs, staggering over the aromas of desire by swallowing the sinuous words of seasonal sirens".
As mentioned above, children were raised in the hippie era, in the era of peace and love. The youngest child is a homosexual who is comfortable in his own skin, always ready to come, even with his bisexual brother.
Xavier likes to tell his adventures. He explains how, instead of doing this in the bushes, he could have taken the boy to a hotel room, "making love to him by promising him that they would be happy together all their lives. But it's easier to empty your balls than to quench your heart."
The children are now between 41 and 52 years old. No one is married. Curiously, Yvonne and Héloïse meet the one they love during this painful return to the family home.
Even if the late father still seems to want to bring the survivors into line, the excesses of the heart escape his orchestration from beyond the grave.
Falaise is a 310-page novel without chapters, at most subtitles on every 2, 3, 4 or 5 pages. The moods most often prevail over the spectacular twists and turns. Guy Verville is a fine psychologist here.
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