Publisher
:
Gallimard
Parution date
:
1988
EAN
:
9782070407682
Description
In Voyage sur la ligne d'horizon, the young Francis sets out on a quest for temporary labor as a tractor driver in the sugar-beet fields of Northern France. He has just lost the grandmother who raised him, and for all worldly possessions carries the saxophone his uncle played in Paris and Naples after the war.
He meets Thérèse and Lucien at the train station the evening of his departure, waiting for his connection. They make friends in the cold mid-night of the empty station café, and he finds himself their guest for one night, or so he thinks. One night turns into a month and more, and Thérèse soon has him settled in permanently: like one of the mirrors in the heavy décor, Thérèse needs him there to reflect her happiness with Lucien back to her, give her hope for the future, and keep despair at bay. Lucien needs him there to keep Thérèse from drifting off down the highway, and towards into her inaccessible Paris youth, as she is wont to do. The music Francis has given up playing and the silenced stories of those post-war days, are the stuff his own extinguished dreams are made of.
Passively receiving Thérèse and Lucien's hospitality, Lucien sleeps through the days and drives the tractor through the nights, blasting his lifeline of jazz and the blues till the batteries run out on his tape-player. Though Francis worries about Thérèse's occasional bouts of promiscuity, and the screams and banging he hears coming from the attic, he doesn't interfere. But by the end of his stay, as tragedy hangs over the house, a line is drawn: Francis has to choose whether to stay and drive tractors for the rest of his life, yielding to passivity and silence, or to make something of his talent on the saxophone. Choosing puts him safel y back on the road, rather than the dangerous median splitting it down the middle.
Author
Luc Lang : Luc Lang is the prize-winning author of the novels Liverpool Marée Haute, Voyage sur la ligne d’horizon, Furies,(with Éditions Gallimard) and Mille six cents ventres (Fayard, 1998, in the original; English translation Strangeways with Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000, Phoenix House 2002), Les Indiens (Stock, 2001), and of 11 septembre mon amour (Stock, 2003). He is a frequent guest at writers' conferences around the United States.
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