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L'Été
Paul tient un restaurant dans le sud de la France. Une vie simple de soleil et d'amitié brute. Un jour d'été, une femme prénommée Sylvia percute sa vie tel un météore. Il la rencontre au bord de la mer, vêtue d'une petite robe noire, elle est en train d'écrire au creux d'un rocher. Sylvia aime un peintre maudit qui vit dans une cave. Amante fêlée d'une inhumaine beauté, elle entraîne Paul dans les rets d'une passion diabolique, parasitée par le spectre d'un rival intouchable ou presque. D'une écriture sensuelle, René Frégni fouille les méandres d'un amour dévastateur et implacable, véritable tragédie se jouant sous un soleil aveugle. Installant une tension psychique extrême, il réinvente dans le cadre chaleureux d'un restaurant méridional, l'éternelle et brûlante chorégraphie d'Eros et Thanatos.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
11 people want to read
About the author
René Frégni
36 books12 followersRené Frégni, né le 8 juillet 1947 à Marseille, est un écrivain français.
Déserteur à 19 ans, il vit cinq ans de petits boulots à l'étranger sous une identité d'emprunt puis revient en France.
Il a connu une existence mouvementée avant de se consacrer à l’écriture. Il a exercé divers métiers, dont celui d’infirmier psychiatrique, et a longtemps animé des ateliers d’écriture à la prison des Baumettes à Marseille.
Il est l’auteur d’une douzaine de romans, imprégnés de ses voyages et de son expérience avec des détenus. Sa vie se partage entre Manosque et Marseille.
L’essentiel de son œuvre est disponible dans la collection Folio-Gallimard.
La ville est presque au centre de tous les polars qu'il écrit. Sa vie aussi.
Il écrit également des livres pour enfants.
Déserteur à 19 ans, il vit cinq ans de petits boulots à l'étranger sous une identité d'emprunt puis revient en France.
Il a connu une existence mouvementée avant de se consacrer à l’écriture. Il a exercé divers métiers, dont celui d’infirmier psychiatrique, et a longtemps animé des ateliers d’écriture à la prison des Baumettes à Marseille.
Il est l’auteur d’une douzaine de romans, imprégnés de ses voyages et de son expérience avec des détenus. Sa vie se partage entre Manosque et Marseille.
L’essentiel de son œuvre est disponible dans la collection Folio-Gallimard.
La ville est presque au centre de tous les polars qu'il écrit. Sa vie aussi.
Il écrit également des livres pour enfants.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 7, 2018
‘Concision kills everything,’ says the femme fatale at the heart of this book. ‘What's essential always lies in the details.’ And yet this is a concise novel, which races through the evolution of a destructive love affair without lingering on the details, choosing instead to pick out the major highlights – or lowlights.
The setting is a nameless town on the Provençal coast, a kind of mini-Marseille where Paul runs a small restaurant in a square. His days are spent washing dishes, watching tourists, and ogling his waitresses – until the fateful morning he encounters Sylvia, and precipitates a downward spiral that takes in animal attacks, psychiatric hospitals, angry French painters, and manslaughter.
What's perhaps most interesting about L'été is how openly nonsensical Sylvia is as a character. No attempt has been made to disguise her as anything other than what she is: a paranoid male fantasy about the beauty and cruelty of women. She is described, breasts-first, in a hundred breathless scenes, flouncing in and out of the story in abbreviated dresses and acceding to rationed bouts of anguished, ecstatic lovemaking.
Paul, our enamoured restaurateur, is driven to pacing his rooms unshaven at three a.m. and exclaiming, ‘Dieu avait dessiné le monde avec la pointe de ces seins,’ which is his (or his author's) idea of waxing poetic. Sylvia herself, meanwhile, rather gives the game away by coming out with such motivational speeches as the following:
Even treated semi-parodically, as in Martin Amis's London Fields, I find this kind of character ludicrous; it's best played for pure aesthetic effect, something like Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. Here, it asks to be taken seriously, which is impossible. The book does succeed in leaving you thinking – just less about the characters, and more about the ideas of men and women that seem to have animated it.
The setting is a nameless town on the Provençal coast, a kind of mini-Marseille where Paul runs a small restaurant in a square. His days are spent washing dishes, watching tourists, and ogling his waitresses – until the fateful morning he encounters Sylvia, and precipitates a downward spiral that takes in animal attacks, psychiatric hospitals, angry French painters, and manslaughter.
What's perhaps most interesting about L'été is how openly nonsensical Sylvia is as a character. No attempt has been made to disguise her as anything other than what she is: a paranoid male fantasy about the beauty and cruelty of women. She is described, breasts-first, in a hundred breathless scenes, flouncing in and out of the story in abbreviated dresses and acceding to rationed bouts of anguished, ecstatic lovemaking.
Paul, our enamoured restaurateur, is driven to pacing his rooms unshaven at three a.m. and exclaiming, ‘Dieu avait dessiné le monde avec la pointe de ces seins,’ which is his (or his author's) idea of waxing poetic. Sylvia herself, meanwhile, rather gives the game away by coming out with such motivational speeches as the following:
« J'ai besoin de vous voir boire, me chercher, souffrir. J'ai besoin de vous voir vous haïr, vous déchirer. Votre jalousie féroce, j'en ai besoin pour vivre. Les hommes disent que je suis belle, je ne les crois pas, ils disent ça à toutes les femmes. Je veux les voir souffrir, je veux les voir vomir de souffrance ! J'aimerais qu'ils s'entre-tuent pour moi ! »
‘I need to see you drinking, searching for me, suffering. I need to see you hating yourself, tearing yourself apart. Your crazed jealousy is what I need to live. Men tell me I'm beautiful; I don't believe them; they say that to all the girls. I want to see them suffer, I want to see them vomit from suffering! I'd like them to kill each other over me!’
Even treated semi-parodically, as in Martin Amis's London Fields, I find this kind of character ludicrous; it's best played for pure aesthetic effect, something like Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. Here, it asks to be taken seriously, which is impossible. The book does succeed in leaving you thinking – just less about the characters, and more about the ideas of men and women that seem to have animated it.
July 31, 2021
Mal escrito, me lo leí en una tarda esperando a que mejorara... Y no lo hizo. Culpabiliza y demoniza a la mujer y el hombre es la víctima de todo... No lo recomiendo
December 22, 2014
(I wouldn't necessarily call these spoilers, though I'd have missed out on some of the fun of the book-long transformation had I read a review like this before finishing the book.)
A moody, summery read for our never-ending winter!
Though I wasn't wowed enough by this text to give it more than 3 (maybe 3.5?) stars, I did think that it worked very nicely as a character study. Paul's transition from ho-hum café owner to maniacal, obsessive lover and back again is fascinating to watch, and I appreciated the author's stylistic reflections of this obsession - the almost constant use of the superlative, exclamation points galore, tortured internal monologues. Watching Paul slowly morph into Altona (and eventually take his place) was fascinating, and Frégni seemed to pace this transition perfectly.
I was less impressed by Sylvia's character - as sex-on-legs she works, but our forays into her psyche and troubled childhood seem forced and unintegrated into the rest of the narrative. Her underdevelopment as a character may be intentional, though - since, as Tony mentions, Paul knows very little about her, it would make sense that we as readers have only a very cursory, piecey portrait of her, as well.
Sylvia does deliver some absolutely killer lines, though. My favorite:
"Peut-ētre ai-je besoin de preuves d'amour. L'amour n'existe pas, seules les preuves d'amour existent. . . S'il n'y a pas de souffrance, il n'y a pas d'amour. J'ai passé ma vie à chercher l'amour, je n'ai connu que la souffrance. Quand je vous voyais souffrir, je me disais que vous m'aimiez."
Why not more stars? I liked this just fine, and thought that Frégni captured his mood and established a very appropriate pacing throughout. The "sensual language" I was promised on the back cover fell a bit flat for me, though, as did the character of Sylvia in general. A brooding, summery read, but not necessarily one that has me clamoring to read more Frégni.
,
A moody, summery read for our never-ending winter!
Though I wasn't wowed enough by this text to give it more than 3 (maybe 3.5?) stars, I did think that it worked very nicely as a character study. Paul's transition from ho-hum café owner to maniacal, obsessive lover and back again is fascinating to watch, and I appreciated the author's stylistic reflections of this obsession - the almost constant use of the superlative, exclamation points galore, tortured internal monologues. Watching Paul slowly morph into Altona (and eventually take his place) was fascinating, and Frégni seemed to pace this transition perfectly.
I was less impressed by Sylvia's character - as sex-on-legs she works, but our forays into her psyche and troubled childhood seem forced and unintegrated into the rest of the narrative. Her underdevelopment as a character may be intentional, though - since, as Tony mentions, Paul knows very little about her, it would make sense that we as readers have only a very cursory, piecey portrait of her, as well.
Sylvia does deliver some absolutely killer lines, though. My favorite:
"Peut-ētre ai-je besoin de preuves d'amour. L'amour n'existe pas, seules les preuves d'amour existent. . . S'il n'y a pas de souffrance, il n'y a pas d'amour. J'ai passé ma vie à chercher l'amour, je n'ai connu que la souffrance. Quand je vous voyais souffrir, je me disais que vous m'aimiez."
Why not more stars? I liked this just fine, and thought that Frégni captured his mood and established a very appropriate pacing throughout. The "sensual language" I was promised on the back cover fell a bit flat for me, though, as did the character of Sylvia in general. A brooding, summery read, but not necessarily one that has me clamoring to read more Frégni.
,
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews