This thriller is a social anticipation. We know it, we repeat it. But still, how disturbing it is, this cursed France, split into extremist phalanxes, depicted by Karim Miské. We are in 2030, three years after our next presidential election. The country is in shock from a coup d’etat, the government, withdrawn to Chartres. Two camps clash: the French League (the far right) and the Islamo-wokists (the far left), renamed “ewoke”, in a nod to Star Wars – “so as not to frighten the children”.
In the middle of this hell, Kamel Kassim lives barricaded at home like Paris behind checkpoints, traumatized by the death of his best friend in a shooting at a café. He writes a detective novel carried – was it a good idea, he wonders – by a black investigator, Lieutenant… Coulibaly.
Miské, author of the very noticed Arab Jazz, in 2012, leaves the broth of religious fundamentalism to immerse us in a politico-ideological fresco anxiety – prophetic? A thriller talisman, to be read to protect yourself.
The extract that kills For three days, I relive the scene in slow motion. People are falling, tables are overturning. My friend looks at me with that funny smile that’s been imprinted on me forever. A red liquid comes out of his mouth. I find it odd: she drank beer, not wine. Really, the things we can think of in those moments. Her knees no longer support her, I hold her back as best I can, we get tangled up, I find myself on the ground, under her. Suddenly absent, like a kid making the outside world disappear by putting his hands over his eyes, I became deaf and blind. Do I still belong to this universe? Did I cross to the other side? I do not want to know it. After an eternity, however, two fingers land on my jugular, a cry rises, they pull me out of there, covered in blood but unscathed. Tony takes care of me, medics and paramedics have enough to do with the injured. I’m alive and it brings me no joy. Living among the dead. Like in my nightmare. And also like this guy I met fifteen years earlier, the day after another series of attacks five hundred meters from here. The guy had taken a bullet in the arm, but his girlfriend had stayed there. All because at the end of their dinner at Casa Nostra he had gone into the restaurant to pay the instant the killers arrived. He felt guilty to death. “I wanted to pay the bill without her noticing, you know, to avoid the bullshit discussion about sharing, so I pretended to go to the bathroom, but I turned for the checkout. The thing I keep thinking about is, the way I was sitting with my back to the street, if I had stayed where I was today…” The guy’s name was Issiaka, his name is etched in my memory. His name, and the pain that distorted his features. Today, his pain is mine. , I discovered them later with binaural sound and 16k images streamed by the attackers before being picked up on all the networks. The fdp party, they titled it, the bastards. It hurts me but no way to take off the screen. No way either to answer Daphne, my daughter, who inundates me with messages. Or do anything but watch this fucking video. We see a drone approaching and dropping a grenade on the checkpoint at the entrance to rue Isidore-Ducasse, suddenly eliminating the militiamen protecting access to the neighborhood. We then see SUVs coming out of who knows where and rushing Chez Gilberte. The faves roll down the tinted windows, take out the Uzi cannons and shoot seven customers. The stray bullets hit two teachers from the Hector-Malot elementary school who were leaving the establishment after tidying up their class, and three faithful in qamis who were going to the afternoon salat in the prayer room of the Malian home .Daphne’s face appears again on my mobile. For the umpteenth time, I don’t answer. What the hell could I say to him? That she was right to drag me into her escape? That my best friend died of an IPA and I’ll never get over it? That it’s not worth living in such a world and that I would rather have gone? How relieved I am that she took refuge in Chartres – where President Humbert retreated with the government, the five hundred and sixty-eight surviving deputies, the three hundred and forty-eight senators and most of the senior administration ; where lives, that’s good, Sixtine, Daphne’s new companion, a native of the country and elected from the first constituency of Eure-et-Loir – but whom I will never be able to get used to the idea that she shares his life with a decerebrating ex-talk show host turned deputy for Equality, the presidential party? That fifty kilometers from the front line, she can’t understand what we’re going through here? Nothing at all.
