Le Gabion

At the beginning, a simple anecdote: a typical hunting gabion from the Normandy marshes breaks away from its anchorage to drift in the Atlantic Ocean, with hunters unable to swim on board. Théo Robine-Langlois transposes this story to an interstellar scale: the Gabion, an asteroid-hunting spaceship designed to be attached to the Earth, drifts through space. Following Anton, we cross the different communities that inhabit the building, a world in itself where customs, models of society, and above all forms of language rub shoulders and clash. Anton, for his part, tries to escape from the one who claims to govern the ship, by collecting photocopies scattered in its meanders, up to its mysterious heart…

Borrowing from the novel of learning as much as from science fiction,Le Gabion is also a chanson de geste: a symbolic odyssey where language and the figure of the author are treated in an experimental way, as part of the story itself. The languages spoken by the characters contaminate the book, which is constructed as a montage where poetry, philosophy, literary history, hip hop and SMS exchanges come together. As they move through Le Gabion, readers encounter different relationships to language, which are concretized at the end of the book by the election of a mayor from a Parisian suburb.

Le Gabioncontinues the work begun by Théo Robine-Langlois in his first book, […], where the typographic subterfuge of suspension points in square brackets signified the existence of holes in the language, of loopholes in the imagination, and of clouds in the sky. InLe Gabion, one can hide in a paragraph, read between the lines of a photocopier manual, fight with missile-poems, meet bloodthirsty children and feminist sororities. We also cross several centuries of French poetry, from the troubadours to Henri Chopin or Hélène Bessette.