“Carnivale”, a labyrinth where lost souls walk

Cramped at the wheel of his old DS whose rear wheels overhang the precipice, the narrator knows that the affair is badly started. It was to be his last tour. The latest debt buyback contracts filled by pigeons. After that, he would finally be freed from this job on behalf of Ponzi, a name that smacks of scam. We will understand, he will not even go at the end of the trip.

In the meantime, he tells about what he has lived, seen. The history of these “Three riders at Motobécane”, three young people who almost signed and who will disappear and reappear throughout the novel. It started with a party “Tinkered with a string before taking on the dimensions of a phenomenon”, to last four days during which the “Unbeatable Leopards”, the name that the three boys will bear, held the city of the delta under the power of their guitars. We saw them rush into an Iveco pickup truck, a van “Who was cold in the back” and that “Tracked you in your journeys or your nightmares”.

Objects pass, like leitmotifs

Each story generates another, each character, appeared as a silhouette in a previous episode, bides his time to take charge of a story, to transform himself, to fade away, to give way to another, even if it means returning to blend in with the final chorus. From one story to another, objects and names pass like leitmotifs. The Iveco van, for example, which gradually asserts itself, a disturbing, evil vehicle, whose presence is a sign of death.

This is what makes it possible to say that the novel, which mixes contemporary themes, accesses the universal of myth, and can be read as that of the metamorphosis and the journey of souls. In all dimensions, a logic is constructed where the motifs are repeated and recomposed like musical themes, subject to variations according to needs. Nicole Caligaris, in these bursts of scene in clear light, uses the logic of thriller, cinema or comics, in an offbeat atmosphere, full of DS and mopeds. A retro charm, with poisonous scents that takes the reader on board, eager to find his way in this labyrinth where it is good to get lost.