Grande forme

A friend once told me, "It's easy to get discouraged by life. If you want to be happy, you have to work for it."

The more time passes, the more I agree with her. There are so many things wrong with the world and the brain loves to focus on what is wrong. Overcoming this natural tendency takes a lot of willpower and optimism.

That's why I was tempted by Grande forme, whose narrator gets carried away by depression and apathy. That's what it sounds like, a human who doesn't want to make any more efforts.

Summary

If the narrator has one constant in his life, it is his mood: "I'm not in great shape." His girlfriend, Jeanne, no longer hides her annoyance at his sluggish attitude. Neither do Jeanne's parents, who have just moved in with them. His cousin, with whom he takes refuge, intimidates him so much that he ends up getting rid of almost all his possessions. And the job he finds in a burst of survival instinct is so dehumanizing that it is absurd.

The only thing he has left is a trunk full of documents: tax statements, bills, photos, childhood drawings, etc. And every day, he has to spend an hour with a kind of psychotherapist with whom he scans, one by one and after long discussions and analysis, all the documents it contains. All these documents are transferred to the Cloud and projected onto a building in the city for everyone to see. Once this process is completed, he will finally be a good citizen.

Impressions

I read Brave New World recentlyand there are many parallels to be drawn. But in Grande forme, the universe is not described in the strictest sense of the word. It is not clear from the beginning that we are not in our modern world: we only think that the narrator is really depressed. It is with little clues here and there that we end up understanding the conditions in which he lives, and saying to ourselves that in the circumstances, we could not do otherwise.

But this is not a depressing book at all, on the contrary. It made me laugh a lot. The character's apathy is so absurd. His working conditions are so awful (he only gets 10 minute breaks and the bathroom is too far away, so he has to pee in a bottle) and his job itself is so impossible (filling an order of medicine every 7 seconds) that it's laughable. His cousin is completely insane, his girlfriend doesn't give a damn about him, and his mandatory daily scanning sessions will ruin him for years to come. It doesn't get much worse than that.

This book is not long, but it is very refreshing. Fans of black humor and absurdity, you will love it.