Retrouve-moi ce soir, by Florian Parent

[Ulysses]

Retrouve-moi ce soir
By Florian Parent
Published by the author, 2022
Four stars

While I read this book in French, I need to write the review in English.

This is a romance about confinement and dreams (as opposed to freedom and reality). I suspect it is a very French kind of romance, because it is surely not romantic in an American or British way. Oddly enough, the author sets this story in California, although at least one of the characters is French. If I was smarter – or remembered my university reading by Sartre and Camus – I might want to say it is existentialist.

The thing that made this book easy for me to identify with is that the action takes place – and Parent wrote it – during the pandemic between 2020 and 2022. The shared experience of surviving a global plague must have inspired lots of writers (including myself). The individual and collective experience of the young men in this book resonates strongly with me, but it is the constant counterpoint between dream and reality that gives the book its strongest attraction.

All of the characters in “Retrouve-moi ce soir” could be my children, and they all have a very different set of expectations for their futures than I – and my husband of 48 years – would have. Presumably, however, the author wants all of his readers to share in the truth of what he writes, and whatever my age difference might be, I fell right into this story of these two men, each of whom responds differently to the anxiety of living in a lockdown like no other in living history.

The author offers three alternative endings to his story. He does so, however, with the warning that he thinks you should just accept the way he ends the story, without the need to have all of the possible future details spelled out for you. Having read the three alternate endings, I agree with the author. The “real” ending leaves the reader free to imagine what he wants to happen next. None of the three offered finales pleased me as much as the author’s initial denouement did. Sometimes it is better to imagine than to know. Fiction, of course, gives us the freedom of imagination.

It is difficult, however, not to read something an author gives you to read. I personally think I should have stopped reading. I'll leave that choice up to you.