This is not a love song by Jean-Philippe Blondel Review

Susan just need a break. The two Töcher, two “little monsters” of a half and four and a half years, you rob last strength. To refuel again, she would like to visit with them their parents. “And I?” Husband Vincent argues that it is of course also stressed. Susan’s suggestion: “You could indeed times your parents visit!” The idea would be Vincent hardly come the narrator, of course. For ten years he has been living now with Susan in London.

With its French past he has then been finalized and off to a radical change. No one would have expected the “sympathetic quitter”, school failure, opportunity jobbers and parasites that he once take responsibility and make something solid on their feet could. But “Les Bleus cafes – oh mon Dieu”, the alternative fast food chain, which he has reared with a partner, establishing itself always better in the UK market.

Recently, the two entrepreneurs radiated even from the title page of a known business magazine.

Vincent, 37 and full of energy, is justifiably proud of themselves. So why not really provide for a week in the French village of sensation where parents, brother and old friends certainly changed her unsophisticated petty bourgeoisie maintain? Were the grandparents still modest domestic workers, so his father could, after all, up to robben officers on the railroad. Babbitt they stayed anyway everyone, especially Vincent’s five years younger brother Jerome. Which has always been a “busy ant”, adapted and boring, but the parents’ eyes. The local patriot became a teacher, his childhood sweetheart Céline married, and if they have not died, they still live happily ever after …

All that Vincent has always abhorred.

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He preferred to chose the form of being a “cricket”: a little chirping, enjoy the sun, not thinking about tomorrow. After leaving school he moved with a friend Etienne, he would have liked as the ideal brother, an apartment together. Nine years lasted her dissolute, debauched dissolute life. Girls went in and out, as well, the alcohol abuse had to intervene drug possession, property crimes and slogans graffiti police officers for. While the neighbors poisonous comments whispered, Vincent sank parents of disgrace in the ground.

Vincent escalator it has carried almost to the social basement, Susan takes the stage. The daughter of a wealthy British household bored for one year as Assistant Teacher in France, and Vincent recognizes his chance. Abruptly, he pulls the ripcord releases from Etienne’s grip and follows Susan to London. Now that he has achieved something that the time has come to look down once from the upper rungs of the career ladder, which is probably from the may have become left behind. Of Vincent’s seven-day trip to his home village and in his past Jean-Philippe told Blondel in his novel ” This is not a love song  ”

The visit was a disaster. Despite good intentions (the father in painting work to go hand to invite the mother to the restaurant, “Peace, joy and pancakes” spread, together play Scrabble, leaf through magazines and stare into the tube …) weakens Vincent already when he was in his old room is quartered. With the familiar to him since childhood smells in his parents’ terraced house – various variants stale Miefs, overlaid by furniture polish – have mixed more unpleasant: the exhalations of aged body, it diligently sprayed artificial lavender aromas that are to bring into the house of Provence, in the mix but with Vincent nothing trigger as nausea.

reunion with brother and sister in law, including common dinner is like a reality TV show. Briefly flashes sincere emotion recover before clichés, platitudes, embarrassments, hypocrisy and embarrassment the upper hand. Can rely solely on the existing solid has always dislike the sister Céline. With old friends – Frank, Olivier and Fanny, the only girl relationship before Susan – fare no better Vincent. After four days, among so many existences which are only a shadow of its former self, he feels like a “wreck the midst of a past full of wrecks”. The extent to which his country “in its traditions and beliefs solidified” is it has “like a lumbago in thinking” hit.

But what has become of his brother WG-Étienne? Neither the phone book nor Google nor the family are used with information. Ironically, Céline, in Vincent’s judgment the hypocrisy in person knows anything to report. She does volunteer work for the homeless – once nothing but “scum” in her eyes. She tells him the sad story of the social crash of his lost friend. Easily it could have been his own story, had it not intervened Susan. Vincent left Étienne then just like that, ignoring the close friendship never cared more, thought only of his own career and family. it does not contribute as complicity in the unbridled case of the left in the lurch friend?

The French author Jean-Philippe Blondel has a keen sense of subtle psychology and communicative nuances. Spitz and profound he draws the characters and places her breaks open, between their present and their past, between its ideals and its reality, between their words and their deeds. It highlights in particular how relations people can overwhelm (family ties, friendship, love) in our time of constant change, leave necessarily victims. On the difficult search for self-realization many the needs of neighbor take in their surroundings hardly true.

As arrogant, not unsympathetic egomaniac Vincent had set out to teach his folks back home in the province of humility. Refined and even a little bit humble, he returns to the metropolis. it appears so quickly and recklessly he was accustomed to give its judgment over others, so vulnerable at the end in his heart. With its airy, amusing tone, laced with subtle irony and consistently go flying in the present tense, is Blondel to read the latest novel liquid (The spacious layout of doing a further notice.). “This is not a love song”, but a pretty fun and easy thought-provoking reading for summer days when mild rain droplets from light gray cotton wool clouds even seduce the sun to some rest