2024 Book Review #13: Au pays du p’tit by Nicolas Fargues

Called a little Michel Houellebecq, I find Nicolas Fargues the author of “Au pays du p’tit” (In the country of the little), better, with similar acerbic descriptions of men too full of themselves, or not sure what they are grasping for anymore, but with faster wrapping endings.

His anti-hero in this book is Romain Ruyssen, a 44-year-old sociology professor who writes about the shortcomings of France in general, cliched but arguably accurate terms, and embodies his own downfall, a victim of early cancel culture and social media, when a visiting professorship possibility in Iowa comes crashing to an untimely end, due to an expensive, misguided trip to reunite with a young Eastern European female groupie in Moscow.

It feels like he’s a survivor though, and that his descriptions and truth telling, however sordidly obtained, are worth the downward spiral.

The author himself is about my age, having seen France first from afar, growing up in Cameroon, Lebanon and Corsica, before doing his French military service in Indonesia as a civilian, just like I did and at about the same time. He then struggled as a journalist, and then started writing in fiction about what he was observing in his different jobs, before heading an Alliance Francaise in Madagascar, the basis of another of his books I just found online, Rade Terminus.