Cécile was a young woman who died prematurely at the age of 27 in a plane crash.The narrator, who had a brief youthful relationship with her, is haunted by her memory. One day, he meets his double in the street and follows the woman.He then imagines the potential lives Cécile could have had, weaving stories around presences and absences.
The novel is structured in a particular way, taking the form of a long, uninterrupted sentence with no distinct chapters. This form reflects the continuous flow of the narrator's thoughts.
He remembers her, the fineness of her hair, the blondness of her eyelashes, the taste of persimmons on her salty lips. The others, those who were close to her, are only ghosts, secondary characters reviving his memory. He is entirely focused on his memory, an evanescent, elusive memory, like the silhouette that appeared in a street in Liège that he mistook for her. He is obsessed with who she might have become. The past is intertwined with the present, the future and the death that must be delayed, like the sentence that will only end with the novel, which we will finish without catching our breath.
Published by Seuil, Quand Cécile is Philippe Marczeswki's third novel. ‘Everything in it is true’, he says. An intimate account of the disappearance of a loved one, Quand Cécile also raises the universal questions of grief, memory and forgetting in language so delicate that it could be called poetic.
