Jacky

LONGLISTED for the Prix Femina, the Prix Femina des Lyceens, the Prix Decembre, the Prix du Flore and the Prix Blu Jean-Marc Roberts

‘My father disappeared in the space of three game consoles.’

At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Anthony and his twin brother grew up surrounded by the close-knit family of his father in a secluded valley in the Nice hinterland. Between loving grandparents, a cousin suffering from a mysterious illness and a lively young uncle, they killed boredom with video games – a new passion passed on by their father, Jacky.

From Space Invaders to Zelda, from Nintendo to Sega, the narrator and his brother's awareness of the world was sharpened by the technical abilities of these strange machines. Little by little, they became a refuge from the pressures weighing on them, the boredom of a daily life without prospects, and the tragedies that would soon strike their loved ones. Until their father's sudden departure.

Anthony Passeron immerses the reader in a bygone era: the carefree days of the late 20th century, with its horizon of prosperity and technological innovation. Blending his personal history with that of the great inventors of video games, this is a declaration of love for his father, in spite of the unhealable wound of abandonment. This coming-of-age novel in three consoles, that stretches from the tenderness of childhood to the disillusionment of adolescence, has the charm and power of a bittersweet social chronicle: ‘I wanted people to finally ask themselves what curse, what rain of contempt, stupidity and brutality had been falling for decades, perhaps centuries, in this valley that some had no choice but to flee.’

Praise for JACKY:

"Jacky is a deeply moving declaration of love to a father who has disappeared, as well as to video game escapism, the best refuge from boredom and family tragedies"

– l’Express

"In Anthony Passeron’s second novel, the sadness is contained, like the anger, it is subtle, perhaps because it is even more intimate. It concerns his father. The author writes: ‘Jacky abandoned his job, his family and his history.’ Passeron was right to use this word. Disappearance is an accident, abandonment is a choice. The writer, for his part, decided not to abandon anything. He took his family story to heart. Despite everything, and by not giving in to fiction, he also delivers a text where the silence remains"

– Le Figaro Litteraire

"This is closer to an Anglo-Saxon memoir than autofiction. There is little fiction, but a remarkable way to situate things. What is touching is that Anthony Passeron drops the masks. He talks about video games, pop culture, entertainment, and manages to tell a story about the world, games, playfulness, and then to talk about death. It is a text haunted by death, by people who fall and disappear. In the same chapters, there is a paragraph about Atari, then a paragraph about his father who is a butcher, his grandparents, and his niece Émilie. It's very subtly done, very well written, with a strong generational dimension."

– Hubert Artus, journalist from Lire on France Inter

"very beautiful and very reserved"

– Arnaud Viviant, France Inter

"Jacky is really extremely powerful"

– Patricia Martin, France Inter

"The intimate narrative and the collective past are once again brought together in this new novel through another first name: Jacky. (…)1989, when Anthony Passeron and his twin brother were just six years old, their father gave them an Atari 2600 with lots of cartridges. The idea was to introduce his children to ‘another world’ – far from the family butcher's shop – and to ‘pass on his passion for cathode ray images, for the magic that happens when light suddenly bursts from the screen thanks to its electron guns’. And so the author subtly oscillates between evoking his relationship with his sometimes complex father and the history of video games and their great creators – all in three parts entitled ‘Atari 2600’, ‘Nintendo Entertainment System’ and ‘Sega Megadrive’. The whole thing could be just too clever, but Anthony Passeron’s great strength lies in his way of showing the subtle links between personal anecdotes and major world events. In addition, he remarkably sketches these kids who escape from family worries or their rural daily lives through games of Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Pacman or Street Fighter. There is an accuracy, an economy of means, a wealth of documentation - all with powerful but never ostentatious emotion (…) A resounding success"

- Tecknikart

"Few novelists can claim to have invented a way of telling stories. Anthony Passeron is one of them. Following on from Les Enfants endormis, which dazzled us so much, this new novel alternates between intimate narrative and sociological investigation.This time, he focuses on the scars of his childhood, particularly the sudden departure of his father, Jacky, who ‘disappeared in the space of three consoles’ after introducing him to video games. He recounts the suffering of a family falling apart against the backdrop of a youth bored and moping away in front of frenzied games of Space Invaders or Zelda. A spinning coming-of-age story"

- Aujourd’hui Weekend

"Is the continuous improvement of video games proportional to the decay of a territory and the breakdown of a family? As he had subtly intertwined the story of his heroin-addicted uncle who died of AIDS and the global history of HIV in his striking first book Les Enfants Endormis, Anthony Passeron does it again with equal talent, narrating in parallel the fate of his family and the march of the world in his second novel. This time, the story centres on his father, Jacky, who works himself to exhaustion in the family butcher's shop in a village in the hinterland of Nice in the 1980s, when the first video game consoles appeared. (…) We see how these little boxes accompanied the decisive moments of childhood and early adolescence of Anthony and his brother, and served as an escape from the village and family traditions, where boys were subject to the virile law of the strongest. (…) For the child, the consoles symbolise the stages of his father's gradual disappearance. For the writer, they serve as transitional objects for writing about Jacky, or even for talking to him (…) This is a moving story"

- Telerama