Jean-Marc Parisis on Love and Loss in Les aimants

Vincent Roy reviews Jean-Marc Parisis's novel Les aimants in art press n°361 (November 2009). Parisis, author of Physique (Stock, 2005), explores love without sentimentality. The brief but powerful novel follows Ava and a suburban boy in 1980s Paris, who become siblings in the 1990s, set against the backdrop of the dying 1980s in the 2000s. Parisis excels at portraying both his heroine and an era, reflecting on memory as "rattles for the dying" and the past as "a child of death, coming out of the womb screaming." Ava's disappearance haunts the narrative: "What I know of her today is useless to me, and what she knew of me I will miss." The novel suggests that when the other vanishes, what you miss is what they knew of you; their death loses you, leaving you to "mechanically exercise your profession of the living." Parisis seeks to restore Ava's light through their shared history, writing what he knows of her to find her beyond the "cold prison of memory."