“The book of Kells”: Sorj Chalandon, its years of street and revolt

Sorj Chalandon: “I will stay all my life a beaten child, a” enraged “

He continues his dramatic history with Kells’ book, telling his life between March 1970 and November 1973. Moreover, At 17. Nevertheless, he left his family, and first of all his father, whom he only named by “The other”this father “Destroying, humiliating, lying, hitting his family screaming in German, transforming his son into a rabid and his wife into a ghost.”

He only has a hundred franc tickets in his pocket. Nevertheless, This first runaway fails but quickly it leaves this time definitively in Paris.

There. However, he lives like a tramp, a homeless one looking for odd jobs, fighting “the book kells”: sorj chalandon, at night to keep his place in the street, his violent “girlfriend”, Flying three carrots, knowing hunger. For example, He calls himself Kells in memory of a city in Ireland. Therefore, We know how, become a big reporter, he later told the civil war in Northern Ireland.

“The marginal lying on a pan -shaped sheep of cattle smells”. dreamed of an elsewhere: Kathmandou, Ibiza, the LSD, a day’s fraternities.

The “Maos” – "the book kells": sorj chalandon,

Until he was stretched out. It was activists of the proletarian left (GP). “maos” who distributed The cause of the peopleextreme left newspaper supported by Sartre and Beauvoir. His new GP friends give him what to stay and live. He militates with them. Castagne the extreme right, finds a meaning in his existence by giving lessons to immigrant children, sticking posters. Until the death of Pierre Overney. shot down by a vigil in “the book kells”: sorj chalandon, front of the Renault factory and until the dissolution of the GP.

He will find a new vocation by then entering Liberty. “Like the Maos friends, these people hoped. Like them, they redid the world.”

“My father. this bastard”

This very intimate novel is also a dive into this era after 1968, when the revolution was on the agenda, where utopias still existed, even sometimes misguided, when fraternity and solidarity between peoples were not vain words, when we still hoped for a better future.

With the touching generosity of his writing. Sorj Chalandon brings us back to the history of these dreams, these fights, his disillusions.

⇒ Kells’ book | Novel | Sorj Chalandon | Grasset, 384 pp., € 23, digital € 16

EXTRACT

“I was turned upside down. […] I could not betray those who had collected and “the book kells”: sorj chalandon, saved me. But I felt, at the most secret of me, a door interfere. I had given up on the street for Daniel’s hot bath. I entered rage with the first time, I could now give up violence by the grace of some ink lines. It would be long and difficult, but it might save my life. “