” Lhe first words say it all”, wrote the man of letters Maurice Blanchot. The deputy Europe Écologie-Les Verts Sandrine Rousseau gave her own people to read at the age of 35 in a particular genre: a humorous feminist thriller. In 2007, she was a lecturer in economics at the University of Lille when her first detective novel appeared. Lille peelings (the next and last will arrive in 2009). The publishing house, Ravet-Anceau, is small, local, but historic since it was founded in the mid-nineteenthe century. The book, in pocket format, is sold at the price of a large format (12 euros), published in a collection which hosts regional detective novels, “Polars en Nord”. Out of print since, this edition can be found online, used.
Behind a tendentious Malabar pink cover and an epigraph At our common places » which sounds like a warning, we find a polar with dry writing, well in the codes. A whodunnit with a murder, suspects, all wrapped up in a contemporary police investigation hard boiled (tough guy, editor’s note). So far, nothing new under the sun. On the other hand, on the side of the assassination and the characters, Sandrine Rousseau proves to be more piquant.
It all starts with a murdered man, peeled to the peeler, like a potato. The caricature is affirmed, the economy sharpened, the black humor, too. His characters form a gallery of characters that Jean de La Bruyère would not have denied; his dialogues, at times, are worthy of Father Ubu:
– “Who is your lover?”
– General de Gaulle.
– Impossible, he’s dead. »
Bad but intriguing, like Inspector Penan
In a 2007 report produced by the INA, Sandrine Rousseau recounts having started writing around the age of 28, ridiculing, in the guise of the investigator, a hated boss, using her pen like a needle on a “voodoo doll”. In the fiction, this “boss” – whose company name she prefers to remain silent today – is called Jean Penan. He is a policeman, hoisted, with the help of time, to the rank of inspector, intimately convinced of being a genius, when he is fundamentally a moron.
“A bottomless pit”, writes Rousseau, of this pot-bellied sleuth who managed to convince himself that the murderesses had bigger breasts, and systematically takes note of the chest circumference of his interlocutors – you never know – cataloged under the acronyms of “GS”, “MS”, and “PS”, for large, medium and small breasts. Servile, he seeks the satisfaction of the hierarchy – “his boss will congratulate him”, follower, he always abounds in the sense of convenience. Quadra de Villeneuve-d’Ascq, brown, chubby, this lambda chicken is distinguished by two physical particularities that run through the book.
The first: “His erratic hairiness and his bulging gaze deprive him of the most elementary charm. Understand that Penan is bald, but his fingers are hairy and he wonders by what “untimely genetic mutation, the hair that is so lacking on the top of his head ends up on the top of his fingers”. Another major characteristic: its color. “Yellow complexion, pastel green shirt, bottle green pants and glassy green eyes,” it read. Even his car, a station wagon, is green and our man never moves without taking with him a halo that gives everything a sickly tint. Penan is a kind of sucker to which one attaches, Rousseau injects in spite of everything a certain sympathy – the innocence of the imbecile – in this great unconscious ridicule of being.
But Jean Penan is also a harmful misogynist who is unaware of himself. Convinced of being the best husband in the world for Madame Marie Penan, he does not need to ask for his whiskey which she obediently brings him every evening when he comes home and settles down in his chair. To prove his affection for her, he regularly gives her a box of After Eight chocolates. That Marie hates, but conscientiously puts away each time in a cupboard, for years, in the kitchen, her universe.
The only problem in their relationship is that sometimes Marie finds herself thinking. It’s a regret for Jean who says to himself that his wife is “decidedly too intelligent”, that he “should think about changing it”.
READ ALSOSandrine before Rousseau, the deconstructed moderate
We find Sébastien Fromentin assassinated naked, the torso and part of the arm peeled with the bursar. However, Fromentin is not a vegetable, but “a beautiful stallion full of life, capable of honoring hordes of blondes”. Fromentin was, during his lifetime, a “serial killer” of “young people, between 25 and 35 years old, blondes, tending to large breasts and rather pretty”. The proof of this is made in the second chapter, when Penan, at the funeral, discovers a “homogeneous human tide, a tide of young women… blondes”. He counts 67. So many suspects.
The mother and the whore, all suspects
Among these 67 suspects, only two attract the attention of the inspector, for his investigation, but also in a personal capacity – their breasts are really big. Two women, two archetypes, two sides of the same coin appear: the mother and the whore.
Julie first, the whore. She is sarcastic, therefore shameless, even “perverse”. Hear that, first mistress of Sébastien – called “Seb” –, Julie is free, does not haggle her favors but offers them; works, like the artist. In the novel, that is to say Penan’s notes, Julie Canteleu is said to be “brazen, without morals, suspicious”. Freedom excites, but does not have a good press.
The other mistress, Margot, the mother, with unblemished morality, happens to be just as suspicious. The young woman is a single mom. A heart that believed in Prince Charming, disenchanted since the father of his son ran away at the time of the epidural, “not even with a midwife”. Disillusioned, Margot remains an incorrigible dreamer. And despite the gap between “the sound and the image” of “Seb”, who says that it’s impossible, that he loves another (Armelle, the official) but embraces her, rejects her while kissing her, rejecting her while making her go up to her apartment, Margot loves her… So she constructs a sad theory on love, “people fall in love between 20 and 30 years old, which is also the age of procreation, and then between 35 and 40, some realize that they made a mistake”. Sandrine Rousseau, mother of two children at the time, did she also realize that she had made a mistake at that age? Or was she fooled by a womanizer before she was 28?
Ecological premises
Green, Sandrine Rousseau is already in 2007, with a strong sense of recycling. Nothing is lost, everything is recovered, even the human peelings – the skin of Sébastien Fromentin – are not thrown away as one might imagine with household waste, but dumped by the assassin on the compost heap in the garden of the inspector… A year after the publication of his first thriller – the next one, What makes cops cry?, will be published in 2009 by the same publisher –, appointed vice-president in charge of “student life, campus life / sustainable development and gender equality”, it is therefore not surprising to see Sandrine Rousseau participate in the creation of vegetable gardens participation on campus. Is there any more useful end, environmentally of course, for a serial flirt, than feeding the roots of dandelions?
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Feminist novel?
Are women really victims in Rousseau? A man peeled with the peeler, another then, with the genitals depilated with pliers then thrown from the top of a bridge… Let us beware of any hasty conclusion, but already in 2007, women are not tender.
One thing is certain, however, between the author ofLille peelings and MP EELV, we already find many points in common. And in particular, in germ, the art of handling archetypes, major oppositions and a sense of repartee or shock formula.
Let’s be generous, since the book is almost impossible to find. This opus, however, gives a foretaste of the barbecue affair which shook our summer of 2022. The “symbol of virility”, as affirmed by Rousseau, finds an automotive precedent: “There are different kinds of attributes power and the steering wheel in a car is one,” it read. Barbecue, steering wheel, remote control, same fight?