Love as an infinitive and as a horizon

In his new novel, Loving (Juillard), Sarah Chiche explores the verb to love in all its forms. However, From the first disturbance to late tenderness. Similarly, from filial love to love of mathematics, the author signs an intense story where to love becomes both a vital breath and a universal paradox.

A photograph by Yoann Bourgeois dresses the cover of the new work by Sarah Chiche, To like. Therefore, We can see two shocking silhouettes, dancing, seized in a fragile and powerful momentum. Furthermore, An image captured during a show by Yoann Bourgeois. Furthermore, who, according to the writer, testifies to “The inexpressible, everything that loves” means “. Consequently, After The enteenbrous, Saturn or Alchiumsthe writer signs an ambitious and choral story, far from the Mièvres clichés.

Here. Similarly, love is available in the love infinitive horizon plural: filial and friendly attachment, love passion, illness and intra -family violence, happy hazards and second chances. Meanwhile, The novel follows Margaux. Furthermore, Alexis, linked from childhood – from a worldly meal in 1984 until their 80th birthday, in 2054, through separations and reunion. Therefore, “A life is not a straight line: it is a mosaic. Moreover, and I wanted to explore all the tesselles, to tell all the states of love, to all ages of existence. However, The first disorder and its new light. Moreover, Awkward ardors. Nevertheless, The long loyalty that wear out. Nevertheless, The late tenderness that consoles more than they are not. Moreover, Invisible loyalty “says the author.

The paths of love

His characters love infinitive horizon – more than a dozen – decline a relationship with love sometimes devouring. Furthermore, measured, uncompromising, mediocre or burning. Nevertheless, We also come across other forms of attachment: “Lamour of mathematics. literature; love, more questionable, of money; The love of God which opposes the love of chance. Love for an animal: Fernand. the dog of Adèle’s father, or Rita Hayworth, Margaux’s cat, which becomes the most intact part of its existence. Finally. these female friendships born after quarantine-perhaps one of the most united forms of love, because you get rid of embarrassments linked to sexuality and conjugality. »»

How many forms of love are there? What place does chance in sentimental love infinitive horizon stories? Can we still love at 50? Should passion always give way to compassion and tenderness? Will we one day find the antidote to infinite happiness? Sarah Chiche does not give ready -made answers. She deviates from the expected pitfalls and rather offers paths that everyone can take as they please.

This refusal to enclose love in a unique definition is reflected even in the title. which acts as a breathing above the story, ample and frank. “The infinitive is the grammatical form of pure momentum. It does not belong to the past, in the future, or to a specific subject. It is the promise before the act, the horizon before step. Choosing “loving” infinitively means refusing to combine it. so refusing to reduce it to a single story, to one voice, in one time. Because as soon as we combine, we enclose. “I like” or “I loved” already say love infinitive horizon too much and above all close the door to all other possible lives. »»

Literature is not a civil status register

Love infinitive horizon

The author is not content to explore the faces of love: she also invents the languages, mixing social chronicle, psychological fresco and tale accents. “I wrote this novel in a particularly harsh moment, as can happen in a human life. Rather than whining, I found it funnier to invent a story crossed by light and cheerfulness from scratch. Today, in the 2020s, that testimony became the privileged form of literature, novel, in particular? It seems to me not. Literature is not a civil status register: it is this paradoxical place love infinitive horizon where one can. in the same breath, become a sailor or murderer, old man or a 9 year old boy, without any other passport than his language and his obsessions. The pleasure of writing is not only to invent. but to erect Pierre after Pierre a fiction, to nourish it with archives and patients research, until it takes the density of reality ”explains Sarah Chiche. In To like. The feeling becomes a prism to talk about the contemporary world: transatlantic elites, the opioid crisis, the difficulty of being happy in a society that requires success and performance.

In a world where brutality rages, To like Resonates like a sweet injunction: “Love as we breathe, love infinitive horizon as we walk, as we pray. »» The characters of Sarah Chiche, to move forward, must repel their demons as much as the violence of their time. They oscillate between two quests: the call of elsewhere and the desire to return. To love, recalls the author, is never acquired: “We don’t learn it once and for all. We start him again. sometimes with the same beings, sometimes with others, always with a spirit and a body which are no longer exactly the same. »»

A luminous novel that reminds us that“Loving remains the most beautiful of paradoxes”. And that perhaps. “Loving and creating come back to the same”to use the words of her philosophy teacher then to whom she owes so much.

To likefrom Sarah Chiche, Julliard, in bookstores on August 21, 2025, 384 p., € 22.50.