Pen in hand, Thomas Morales is not a man to shy away. Singer of a past too quickly evacuated, he is honored to be called “Mr. Nostalgia”named after “this country that we do not choose”no more than the feelings attached to it. Coming into the world at the time of Giscard, a rural kid with a torpid childhood, a lazy youth, he moves forward, “a rearview mirror in the head”and practical “a truant literature of local roads”.
Proudly displaying his taste for old-fashioned pleasures, Thomas Morales cannot bring himself to see the province being evaded, erased, judged, overlooked with contempt. It irrigates his imagination, permeates his tastes. His pockets are stuffed with madeleines. Offspring of the diagonal of the void, it exalts the nobility of the simple, carries the word ” popular “ in a saltire, claims it.
” Popular, he pleads forcefully, is neither an insult nor a title to glory, it is a state of mind, an atavism, tastes, fraternities, a foundation, a armor, a dam, laughter, flashes, silences too, a reed that does not break. »
Praise of the province
Also a memoirist of a vanished Paris, this disciple of Henri Calet is saddened to see Paname losing his spirit and falling into a flavorless zeitgeist. “To have lived so long, until my majority, in a destitute village in Berry, and inevitably to have learned the passage of time, its slowness and its languor, will have been a blessing from God”he writes.
This local of withdrawal, who made his humanities in the regional daily press, deplores the advent of a disembodied, pale, impersonal journalism. He was guided by the articles of Antoine Blondin which taught him to « fermenter » his inconstancy. Little enamored of the truth, nor inclined to track down the scoop, this melancholy nonchalant, with short combative chapters, castigates « l’abandon »the “denial” and the dictates of the moment to do “honorable amends” without really knowing what, ultimately.
With “the panache of the skinned”head held high, he is not afraid to write: “I don’t know a more beautiful word in the French language than province. » The line is lively, the praise sincere and the style striking, out of date, uncomfortable with the times. Discomforted by a form of new moral order which camouflages its fragility with unequivocal severity, Thomas Morales hardly takes this “company under surveillance”full of threatening injunctions and strange prohibitions.
The author relies on the immemorial wisdom of his native land, blessed with a sensitivity inherited from childhood whose precious legacy he does not want to betray in any way. We know of worse passports to get through life.
Tender is the provinceby Thomas Morales. Ecuador, 240 p., €19