“I am Romane Monnier”, by Delphine de Vigan

She loves them, these fragile, cracked protagonists, who try to hold on thanks to love or friendship. They illuminated Loyalties Or The gratitudesand attach us, once again, to his new novel I am Romane Monnier.

“These characters come back in spite of me, without me being aware of it,” confides Delphine de Vigan, multiple award-winner for Nothing stands in the way of the night, novel about his bipolar mother. What interests me is the flaw that we all have, this fragility of beings, this feeling of disconnect with others, this impression of not being sufficiently armed in the face of today’s society. »

Thomas is one of them, a somewhat loose father who faces empty nest syndrome. Léo, his daughter, has flown away but remains in continuous contact with his “Mapa”, and this father-daughter relationship, subtle, funny and deep, is not the least charm of this very contemporary story.

Following an evening at the bistro with his best friend, Thomas finds himself in possession of the cell phone of an unknown young woman who, instead of recovering her property, leaves him the device with all its codes and disappears. Thrilled, Thomas opens the virtual doors of the phone one by one and immerses himself in the life of its owner, a certain Romane Monnier, 29 years old. He discovers her friends, her concerns, her tastes, her distress, her attempt to find a truth that she cannot grasp. This story reflects back to him his own experience.

Trompe-l’oeil traces

Interweaving the transcriptions of the discoveries made on the phone and Thomas’ journey, Delphine de Vigan weaves a protean novel which questions our practices and the meaning of our life in the all-digital era. “What are the individual and collective traces that we will leave? she asks. If our whole life is in our cell phones, they are not eternal. No more than the floppy disks of twenty years ago. I tried to find one of my very first manuscripts: impossible! »

We have indeed moved from paper to dematerialization. “We can still find, in a few shoeboxes, photos, postcards, letters… But tomorrow, what will we keep from this digital ocean? » A dizziness that affects us all, including the young people the novelist interviewed.

Joined by a reflection on the truth which seems to escape us, such is the dense flow of information, and on the violence of the images, relayed continuously. “What does this do to our brain? Are we able to handle this? I hope that, through fiction, readers will ask themselves the question. » Above all, they will be carried away by the pas de deux of these disoriented people, who are so like us.