New witch hunt

Going to the chalet and not knowing which book to read by the pool or the lake?

I recommend one, basic, that will allow you to better understand the crazy times we live in: Sir Etampesby Abel Quentin.

Neighborhood mechanics

Winner of the 2021 Prix de Flore (a prize created by writer Frédéric Bejbdeer to reward daring young authors), this novel chronicles the descent of Jan Roscoff, a professor of history who just published a biography of a black poet, to Hell.

Because he is white, and did not emphasize in his autobiography the race of the poet in question, preferring to speak of his style (which, to race-obsessed anti-racists, constitutes a crime of royal self-insult), this thinker is the target of a group of armed men He woke up Who spoils his reputation and poisons his life.

Abandoned by his friends and colleagues, who would rather save themselves than defend him, and brand him a racist on social media, the man sinks into the sands of political correctness.

We leave this book with a lump of pain in the throat.

Victim of a demonic mechanism that he can do nothing against, Jan Roscoff, the book’s hero, is crushed, devastated, and torn to shreds by a gang of youngsters who take on themselves for the defenders of the oppressed, but who, in reality, are the true villains.

Full charge against the militants He woke up who turn our universities into re-education camps.

religious extremists

For the author, Abel Quentin (who remembers Michelle Welbeck, with his ironic humor and bleak desperation), He woke up They are not political activists.

They are religious extremists, blinded by their faith.

Who leads a crusade against the infidels.

That’s what I feared Jean: the strength of an unshakable conviction. This conviction was nourished by the narrowest sectarianism, and by the obsessive fascination with the character of the victim (a character that did not recognize any counterforce, for the new forces had raised passion to the rank of supreme value, and suffering as a universal measure.)…”

For Quentin, those warriors who are willing to do anything to crush their enemies are actually hypersensitive and whiny little rabbits.

“Doing no harm has become the obsession of our times when we possess small and sick things, and are eager to bear their emotional integrity, so that we may never encounter a word that might offend their feelings.”

On the edge !

in his room Salem witchesWritten in 1953, American playwright Arthur Miller tells how in 1692 Puritan priests accused women of practicing witchcraft without evidence.

Sir Etampes It is the modern version of Miller’s play.

It’s the same witch hunt, the same purification, the same Christian sectarianism that turns every “unbeliever” into a criminal, a sinner to be punished, sacrificed, sacrificed on the altar of intellectual purity.

“It is the spirit of absolute seriousness against which nothing can be done,” Abel Quentin wrote. What can be done against the religious? »

A chilling novel.