Jean-Paul Dubois took his time and he did well.
Five years after the fantastic and melancholy “All men do not inhabit the world in the same way”, a novel awarded the Goncourt Prize in 2019, the Toulouse author is back with “The Origin of Tears”.
A masterful story, carried by a particularly endearing antihero and a still beautiful pen.
A poetic and absurd novel, also cold, where death and despair are omnipresent but where humor and tenderness are at the corner of each page.
At home, the antiheroes are called Paul.
“The Origin of Tears” is no exception to the rule.
Here is the story of Paul Sorense who hates his father so much that even his natural death does not appease him.
So at the age of 51, he fired two bullets into the corpse which had just arrived from Canada.
Right in the head.
He gets away with the obligation to seek treatment.
For a year, he will find himself in the office of Frédéric Guzman, a formidable psychiatrist, a brilliant character.
It is during these sessions which punctuate the novel and which "colonize his mind more and more" that Paul will explain his actions, the hatred of his father, a detestable character whom he compares to a moray eel.
A story that is devoured like a black comedy
He will also talk a lot about his two beloved mothers, the one he carried him for 9 months with his twin brother before they both passed away and the one who raised him and loved him so much.
To this man who spends his time discreetly wiping away a tear, Paul will confide to him the origin of his own.
Jean-Paul Dubois draws with great tenderness the portrait of a very lonely man who loves dogs and whose companion is an AI, an artificial intelligence called “U.No.
» A character who runs a body bag company, a battered hero who has never recovered from the death of this twin brother and his biological mother.
A death which “must have fostered in him the syndrome of the little kangaroo, this marsupial which is reluctant to leave the maternal pouch as life there is gentler than elsewhere”.
It's 2031, there's an end-of-the-world atmosphere, viruses threaten to migrate from Portugal, it's raining incessantly.
However, this novel is anything but leaden.
It’s all the talent of the author that takes us through all the emotions.
We are often very moved and our tears are never far away.
We also laugh with this story which is devoured like a black comedy.
From the great Jean-Paul Dubois.
Editor's note:
4.5/5
“The Origin of Tears”,
by Jean-Paul Dubois, Ed. L'Olivier, 256 p., 21 euros