Charlotte Monsarrat’s first novel is that of a future where memories can be extracted from deceased people to make real public feature films. A psychological technothriller with a hectic investigation, but above all an intimate story.
Here comes the end of film shoots, considered too polluting, in the near future imagined by Charlotte Monsarrat. The fragmented souls is the story of a world where filmmakers have state-of-the-art technology to extract memories, in the form of usable data, in order to create real feature films. These are “film memories”. But this excellent first novel, published by Anne Carrière editions in February 2023, is also an intimate story in the hollow of a life.
And more precisely the life of Véronica, who is herself a director of film memories. After being a rising star of the genre, she is going through a period of blank slate. But personal life and professional life suddenly come together when, viewing the video memory data from a deceased criminal, she recognizes herself in the images – through, therefore, his gaze. The problem is that she has no memory of it. Has his memory been truncated? If so, was it intentional or not?
A hectic investigation begins to reconstruct the past, conducted with a mastered art of narration by Charlotte Monsarrat, who builds a lively and endearing character.
Charlotte Monsarrat’s psychological technothriller
The future depicted in The fragmented souls remains relatively vague: we perceive this futuristic society only through the eyes and the personal history of Véronica. This is Charlotte Monsarrat’s clever sleight of hand: the story is palpable through a human gaze and seems terribly present — temporally, physically. The action doesn’t seem remote in any way.
The first ambition is not so much to extrapolate a future as to tell the fate of a character. Charlotte Monsarrat uses technology as an ontological artefact of our humanity, as a revealer of our ills.
The fragmented souls is ultimately a psychological technothriller. The novelist tells the story of diluted identities in a technological society that scatters what we are into a thousand pieces. With the intimate effects that this can have: the heroine, Véronica, does not appear only fragmented, but broken, in family, love, professional burnout.
But it’s not without subtleties, because we also understand that with or without the technology itself, Véronica wouldn’t necessarily be better off. Film memories are a digital catalyst: if we are our memories, what do we become when technology interferes in our brains? What is our personality based on?
Fragmented souls, Charlotte Monsarrat, 250 p., Anne Carrière Editions
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