“They are going to kill your sons”, by Guillaume Perilhou: without restraint

“They are going to kill your sons”, by Guillaume Perilhou, L’Observatoire, 160 p., €17, digital €12.

The judge who listens to Guillaume, 15, recount the touching suffered, in his childhood, by his father, seems surprised by the crudeness of his language: “She seemed surprised to hear unrestrained words as if one had to be shy to tell the truth. » Guillaume tells the truth, and he is not shy.

“Without restraint” are his words, but also his whole being, he who has “the phobia of boredom” and the taste for colorful clothes, skirts, dresses, high heels – when he puts them on, on the stage that his bedroom is for him, he becomes Raffaella (“according to Raffaella Carra, a vulgar and ridiculous Italian singer”). However, school and life in society worked hard, without always succeeding, in instilling shame in him, after having taught him the fear of being beaten up for what he is: “As a child, I encountered terror every day. » The psychiatric hospital, where he is interned after his revelations about his father earned him first being sent to a home, separated from his mother (we didn’t believe him, he just had to be “shy” and “restrained”), works to reduce it further, to subjugate its energy, its exuberance, with shots of pills, even electric shock sessions.

painful vitality

Guillaume resists this little programmed death as long as he can, to the point of madness (“Mad people are despised resistance fighters”, he says, quoting the writer Mathilde Forget). It is the struggle between a life drive deemed excessive and its attempt at methodical destruction that furiously traces They will kill your sons. The first novel by Guillaume Perilhou, 32, has nothing to do with usage. His ardor does not always have time for commas and breaths or to differentiate the narration from the dialogues. The text leads the reader on his journey without leaving him the choice, embarking him with its painful vitality, its short chapters, its funny and / or terrible cocks and donks.

What could be more difficult to reproduce in literature than a child’s or adolescent’s voice? The one invented by Guillaume Perilhou impresses with its accuracy, which embraces the excesses of his character and his amorous outbursts, while the boy is careful not to feel sorry for himself, to psychologize or sociologize anything. He ends up sinking into a form of dementia, and it is the other feat of this book to operate this shift without falling into ridicule. The great strength of Guillaume Perilhou, moreover, consists in making fun of it, in taking the risk in all conscience. This is ” without restraint “ let it burst into literature, and perhaps that is always the way it should be done.

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