Comme Un Garcon

His name is Pierre. Pierre Garçon - which means boy. "Like a boy," they used to say in the school playground in Nanterre. As time went by he shrugged off this name, replacing it with a pseudonym. He has spent many years looking back over the past, searching for a love he lost when he was twenty. It is only when he closes his father's eyes and mouth for the last time that he becomes brutally aware of time flying by. Of the need to break away from his youth.
Pierre takes a hotel room for a week so that he can write. The hotel is on the Place Clichy in Paris, as close as he can get to Lucie's face, which has been haunting him since 1979. While a record player plays the soundtrack of that era - Patti Smith, Zappa, Higelin - he remembers how he met the young girl and their group of friends, all politically aware and sharing their taste in films and books. The time of Pierre Goldman, Mesrine, Sartre, Marchais, Mourousi and Ockrent. The death throes of the Giscard years. The end of the black and white world. Images springing up from the past are countered with those of today, illustrating a cynical, materialistic age from which Pierre feels increasingly estranged. In that hotel room a whole theatre of ghosts, shadows and lights comes to life again as women's faces scroll across his computer screen. In the hope, perhaps, of finding his lost love.
In Like a Boy Pierre-Louis Basse has produced an elegant and melancholy first novel.
Pierre-Louis Basse was born near Nantes in 1958. Stock published his biography of a young resistance fighter, Guy Môquet, Une enfance fusillé in 2000. He has also written a social trilogy: Ma ligne 13 (Le Rocher, 2003), Ça va mal finir (Le Rocher, 2005) and Ma chambre au Triangle d'Or (Stock, 2006); as well as Séville 82 (Privé, 2006) and 19 secondes 83 centimètres (Stock 2007).