The intolerance of cancel culture in the novel “Le Visionnaire”, by Frenchman Abel Quentin

At the start of the 1980s, the young academic Jean Roscoff, passionate about left-wing ideology, had a promising career ahead of him; Yet, over time, life passes over him without his realizing it and, forty years later, now retired and recently divorced, no one remembers him.

Jean attempts to make a name for himself in the French cultural guild after writing a book about a virtually unknown American jazz player and poet who died in an accident in France in the early 1960s. form. Roscoff bases his study on a thesis: for the character, a communist party soldier was more important than his black race. And that cannot happen in the world of intellectual decolonization.

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Once the book is published, by the hand of a small publisher, Jean’s life changes. As a result, you will be in the front line of battle in front of public opinion. Someone throws the first stone and the comedy begins.

“Context should not be overlooked,” Quentin says in an interview. “Roscoff is a man in difficulty. They accuse him of cultural appropriation on social networks. More specifically, they accuse him of having written a book on Robert Willow, a black American poet who is very dear to him, without sufficiently insisting on the importance of his black identity (…). Roscoff undergoes a real witch hunt. Those who attack him leave him no chance to defend himself. They don’t want to listen to his explanations, just teach him a lesson, “override” him. Hence the insult, “fascist”, at a time when Roscoff feels like a rabbit caught in the headlights, cornered. In fact, his detractors act like a pack of dogs, agitated by the smell of blood.”

In the 376 pages that make up “The Visionary”, the young French author manages to create, hand in hand with his character, a brilliant satire of our times, an amusing and refined x-ray of who we are, of the culture of cancellation and of the generational shock that overwhelms us today today. With this novel, Quentin received the Prix de Flore and the Prix Maison Rouge. This is his second work of fiction. With the first, which he titled ‘Sister’, was a finalist for Gouncourt Prize in 2019. It’s a prose that is making its way, but which has only already shown at the start that it has quality.

“The Visionary” It is one of the titles that aspires to stay with the Gouncourt Prize in its 2023 edition and the truth is that it would not be very surprising if it were Abel Quentin who gets it

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The book, recently published in Spain by the label Books on asteroids, dives into the life of Jean Roscoff, this history teacher who didn’t really know how to occupy his free time and decided one day to sit down and write. She drinks a lot, has a friend who is a millionaire, an ex who despairs of her existence, a daughter who loves her and a daughter-in-law who looks like a feminist, but at the same time she behaves like a “Pennsylvania puritan”.

“There were three of us around the table: me, my daughter Léonie and her friend Jeanne. It was already a small revolution. Five years ago, I instituted the ritual of a Sunday dinner for two with my daughter. Third parties were not accepted. I did it on the advice of my ex-wife, Agnès, to “sanctify a father-daughter moment”. Agnès, who provided such valuable advice, whose wisdom I had been cruelly yearning for since the divorce now that I had to follow my own path (…) Léonie lived in Pontoise, in the Saint-Martin district, which spread out its streets narrow and wet around the station. He had never invited me to his house, and I had resigned myself; she was no doubt afraid of my sarcasm when she discovered that after the move she had recreated the decoration of her little butch nest to the millimeter, with her Christine and the Queens posters and her scents of Armenian paper. It was terrifying to inspire such a feeling in a girl (instead of embodying the refuge, the gaze under which to shelter). In fact, the sarcasm that escaped me was sometimes directed primarily at myself. I was angry with Léonie for being too much like me. My daughter had inherited my certain tendency to fail, although hers was not accompanied by the bitterness of mine, its sinister lucidity; she was happy as castanets” – (Fragment).

With a perfectly assembled plot and a precise critique of certain moral values ​​and certain spheres of society, this is a novel that offers the reader an interesting analysis of the use of time throughout our lives. Depending on one decision or another, everything can end up being harmful or favorable.

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