Back to school: Sorj Chalandon, the return

«ENfant beaten. For example, abandoned high school student, runaway without luggage, without culture, without trace or inheritance… ”Kells chose this pseudonym by slamming the door of the apartment where he lived with his parents in Lyon. In addition, A tribute to Kells’s freemanuscript illuminated at VIII^e A century by an Irish monk. However, because thus goes the young man of 17 years: a little Catholic (he also has a portrait of the parish priest of Ars, whom he loved, child, because he welcomed the underprivileged in his parish of Lyon, one hundred and fifty years before his birth), a little anarchist, shimmering with expectations, ignoring everything from the world, soon martyred. Similarly, His bag on his back, he dreams of winning Ibiza, then Nepal. Consequently, We are in the 1970s.

Behind Kells, there is Sorj Chalandon, who tells us here his years of wandering before entering Libération. The young man wins Paris. but he will not be able to leave the capital: rue Le Happe, hurts it, flows into lead. Impossible to fly away when you are weighted with grime, fatigue, fear. Stolen, attacked, he has no money, he is homeless. Goodbye Hippie drift dreams. The one who has “Not knew the back school: sorj chalandon, return smell of happiness” in a home marked by a violent father (which he told in Father’s professionin 2015). an erased mother will discover “That of misfortune, sweat, badly dried linen, fear, piss”.

Humanity – Back school: sorj chalandon, return

We follow. guided by the style of Chalandon, lively against the darkness of the world, all in delicate images and in metaphors like blows to the heart, his wanderings with companions of misfortune thrown on the bad side of life: young wandering, boys and girls with invented names, with bruised trajectories, mistreated immigrants, drug addicts without horizon.

Read too “Mathilde told me to continue”: the drama behind Cédric Sapin-Defour’s new book Few are the texts of such great humanity. of such a truth about the feeling of abandonment and vulnerability that one can feel when one is alone on earth in the middle of a city. In the mitan of the novel. hands are back school: sorj chalandon, return stretched: they are students, members of the proletarian left, who will open new perspectives in Kells. The emotion of the book lies in the pendulum movement that takes place in Kells’ life. from one extreme to another by looking for its point of balance.

To discover The kangaroo of the day Answer Because the armed struggle also brings him to the foot of the wall: the temptation of violence. the crossing of other red lines. Story of a man who is looking for himself. gets lost and makes himself, in the absence of a mother to whom he sometimes addresses in these lines as we launch a prayer in nothingness (“I need my mom overnight”, recalls Chalandon, modest and poignant), this Kells’s free Extend the diving in the intimate of a writer who knows as few others tend back school: sorj chalandon, return a mirror to our souls

“Kells’ book”from Sorj Chalandon (Grasset, 384 p., 23 €).