Published
Reading time: 5min
After “Journal of a scenario” and “Fort Alamo”, Fabrice Caro returns for this 2025 literary school year with a tender and melancholy chronicle on youth, between friendships, first loves and memories of an era with pop and nostalgic accents.
Last days of weightlessness is the new novel by Fabrice Caro, published by Gallimard in the Sygne collection (that of novelists with a unique voice from other disciplines), which released Thursday, August 14. The author seems to have adopted a Nothombian rhythm, with one novel per year, after the enigmatic Fort Alamo in 2024 and the comic Journal the to Sennario a 2023.
Chronicle of a year of final year in the 1980s, the novel recounts the daily life of Daniel, a high school student surrounded by his two best friends, Marc and Justin, dreaming of passionate love with some of their comrades. In parallel with his studies, Daniel provides private mathematics lessons for 50 francs (around 8 euros) per hour to a mutical girl, Béatrice Rigaux. His life seems to be quite banal, despite the mysterious appearance of a Renault 5 each time he arrives in the villa to give lessons, and the daring advances of Béatrice’s mother.
“As for going further than a kiss, it was unthinkable. My mother would have landed with the laundry of the whole neighborhood. I liked this observation as depressing as surreal: I owed my late virginity to a heap of clean cloth.”
Fabrice Caro“The last days of weightlessness”, page 15
Last days of weightlessness, It is the story of these wild years of high school, kingdom of appearance and friendships in life to death. Those of simple loves which do not last more than two months, where the only contacts are signs of the embarrassed hand and small kisses, but where we already consider the other as the love of his life. Loves often interrupted by a parent stressed to see his child grow up, watching behind the door the actions of the two hedonist teenagers.
The writer draws up, with the help of a multitude of references, the portrait of the 1980s in France, where young people listened to Yoko Ono, Elsa or Supertramp while looking, through their hair in the hard rock Mulet Cup, the illustration on their cereal box; Where the parents bought a Canal+ decoder to watch football matches, the opportunity to end up with friends lost with sight. The time of the first homemade computers and the first video recorders.
For young people, and above all for Daniel, the year of terminal is the last before switching to the adult world, the world where you have to know which job you want to exercise for the rest of its life. He does not know what he wants to do later: because later, it’s in a long time. Before, what matters to him is to be invited to the evenings is to win back Cathy Mourier, who was entitled with Gilles Rouquet without reason, it is to chat without being caught during the endless lessons of history and physics-chemistry.
“Our days were a row of lost moments, a condensed mess that we honored on the pretext that he was going to open all the doors to us and would allow us to have a good situation later, when we were bald and tired.”
Fabrice Caro“The last days of weightlessness”, page 59
Through a light and impactful style, the author of the comic strip Zaï zaï zaï zaï Key certain sensitive points of adolescence and navigate between euphoria and feverishness. He brilliantly deciphers the pivotal age of 18 years, too young to have the license but too old to drive moped. The age when when you are in a family car, while everyone wants to put their own cassette and sing at full lung, you have to listen to Johnny Hallyday loop, because his father is a fan. But for the first time, seeing his moved father touches us. Lost between our childhood and our adult life, we start looking for the unknown, wanting to understand those around us and discovering new sensations.
The novel makes us want to join these young people who laugh during history-geography lessons. We would like to end up with Daniel, Marc and Justin, just sit for a day on these uncomfortable chairs. Listening Justin to embark on a great explanation on the location of the G -spot, while other comrades discuss, mixing their voices with that of the professor that only a few students listen with attention, in addition to the flies who would like to be heard.
Last days of weightlessness touch in the heart. Fabrice Caro takes up images certainly known to everyone, but infuses his words and his funny and dreamer gaze there, varying his pen of these bridges and funny situations that any young 1980s has already experienced.
“The last days of weightlessness” by Fabrice Caro, Gallimard editions, 224 pages, 20 euros.
Extract : “I had never heard anyone in my entourage to boast of being in an incredibly positive dynamic, nobody had ever arrived in the morning while chanting Say I have one of these peaches for this bac! We all bathed in a high state of depression, navigating between these two paradoxical waters that constituted the best period of our life at the same time as the worst. “(Page 81)