With its title that immediately reveals fantasy and irony, Fouad Laroui's new book, 30 days to find a husband, announces the color: pleasure will be at the heart of this new opus. Pleasure to say for the characters of the book, friends seated at a coffee table and who, each in turn, tell a story.
"We were at the Café de l'Univers, one spring Sunday, languid, idle. By idleness, we had agreed to tell each, in turn, a remarkable story and then to draw a moral, a lesson – or even several. »
Pleasure to read, of course, for those who, discovering the words of these fine speakers from their reading chairs, are in a way invited to join their circle. Pleasure to write for the author, who obviously had a lot of fun bringing all his protagonists together and developing texts where the form does not yield to the content, in other words where the style and the choice of words have at least as much importance as the meaning and depth of the ideas expressed.
Between novel, short stories and tales
Composed of separate stories but linked by the characters' comments and reflections, 30 Days to Find a Husband is part novel, part short story collection, part storybook.
The first text gives its title to the whole and offers an outline of the general intention. We follow Khaoula, a Moroccan librarian who wants to take advantage of a training trip to Paris to unearth as quickly as possible a rich American likely to put the ring on her finger and take her to live far away. Rather than waiting for a favor from fate, the young woman forces luck by starting by "going to drag her shoes near the United States Embassy". Once spotted the potential chosen one, she manages to get to know him over a drink in the nearest bar:
“And the rest, my friends, is history, the tiny one: Khaoula is now an American citizen […] The fact is that she had achieved her goal; and in less than thirty days. Hats off. »
Offering in turn a comparable story, a second narrator relates the journey of his entrepreneur cousin, Najlaa, who, one day becoming aware of the vacuity of her private life, begins to plan her marriage as a strategist. After a first fiancé ousted for infidelity, the young woman resorts to mathematical calculations to select the best match possible. And the narrator concludes:
“The next day, she was having coffee with Ayman, the number 2 in the algorithmic ranking. She set him a few little traps in which he did not fall […] Ayman and Najlaa are now a well-married couple. They walk hand in hand on the beach of Aïn Diab, they choose their curtains together and go to spend the weekend in Dakhla or in the Atlas. »
We will still come across, throughout the collection, a poor salesman impressed by his Chinese buyers, a puppeteer deceived by his own stories, a flower thief stuck in his lies, a burglar under the influence of drugs, a motorist who meets the love after a driving error, a man struck down with love by a single glance and another who persists in refusing his destiny... The humor is obvious: "Fed up with philosophy!" Let's tell fun stories! », launches one of the characters.
Emancipated and voluntary women
Already author of some thirty books, Fouad Laroui offers here a series of stories as original as they are unexpected, which we will appreciate for themselves, even if their moral - "atheists are women like the others" , for example – is sometimes perplexing. But under the pen full of verve of the writer, women, precisely, turn out to be all emancipated and voluntary, capable of taking charge of their own destiny without worrying too much about the gaze or the judgment of others. To stage these heroines too modern to be totally probable, the writer in turn frees himself from veracity by adopting a style of narration where chosen language, rare words, precious expressions end up creating an effect of jubilant theatricality:
"Damn it! Name of a dog ! Damn it ! This one, I didn't expect! Was that really her father? Reality surpasses affliction. »
The world and its current events thus find themselves on the margins of this explosive book which can be understood as an illustration of freedom of expression itself, a nod to a form of writing and sharing the old one. A word that we take the time to express, to listen to, to comment on, to meditate on. A language which, unlike that which abounds today, knows how to express nuance and subtlety.
