Les Forces
LONGLISTED for the Prix Medicis, Prix Decembre, Prix les Inrocks and Prix Blu Jean-Mark Roberts
It's the story of a girl who doesn't agree with the social order.
Is there a way out?
Why should life’s sole purpose be to make us live in the world as we know it?
Has our attention become a form of property, like land?
Are our faces images, shop windows?
Has something broken inside us?
Part Odyssey, part existential enquiry, LES FORCES is a deep dive inside the human mind, dissecting the social structures that influence our thoughts and questioning the true meaning of the human experience, asking how to be and how to stay alive in this world, in all its violence and tenderness. Travelling from childhood to writing, via a mysterious lesbian bar, through an abandoned house, into a building filled with cults occupying every floors, onto the top of a mountain, the narrator takes us on a furious odyssey dotted with Homeric mirrors and bards’ chants that show us the book in the making.
Alternating between the prosaic and the theoretical, the book unfolds in a narrative ranging from the tragic to the comic, through the narrator’s initiatory and political journey. Nature is perceived as an incessant flow, a vital energy, each segment of which can contain the whole. We are reminded of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Samuel Beckett, and Simone Weil in the way Laura Vazquez approaches force. A cardinal novel in the work of Laura Vazquez.
Praise for LES FORCES:
"Les Forces fascinates with the power with which it tackles immense questions, not by pretending to find answers to them, but by testing their depth and density. Laura Vazquez delves into the depths of our anxieties, guided only by a language that comes from the depths of the body. Her words are like muscles, holding the sentence together, making it mobile, explosive and extraordinarily accurate"
– Le Monde
"Reading aloud is essential. A cappella, from the stomach, with full lungs. Or just for yourself, quietly, deep inside. Inside, outside: this is the great undertaking of poet and novelist Laura Vazquez, who has been pushing the boundaries of this vibrant, restrictive vessel we call the body, in order to escape through thought, breath, and language. And what a language it is! Organic, contemporary, with a mastery of phrasing that bursts forth like a living, autonomous entity, yet also seems to be the culmination of centuries of development, assured by generations of writing. Laura Vazquez gives her all (…)She dissects reality, aware of the forces that run through it, compel it, divide it. (…) Les Forces relishes a sense of fulfilment born of the pleasure of discovery, of the joy of establishing a sensory and cerebral inventory of every moment lived. There is only one word for it: poetry, a literary genre reinvented in body and soul by Laura Vazquez"
- Telerama
"In this second epic novel, Laura Vazquez attacks the social order with exhilarating freedom. Blending poetry and prose, essay and novel, philosophy and satire, the poet imagines a profoundly queer journey of initiation, whose goal is to expose the violence of contemporary social norms and to dismantle them piece by piece. A subversive and political read, laced with irresistible humour and derision"
– Les Inrocks
"With Laura Vazquez, the adventure of being oneself is transformed into a hallucinatory and fantastical odyssey, intoxicating and political. Her heroine navigates the stagnant waters of a society whose codes she instinctively rejects, feeling as though she is “living in a world of dead people”. In this spellbinding journey, woven with multiple quotations, the author recounts the emergence of a voice and asserts her own more than ever. With unparalleled strength"
– Le Nouvel Obs
"Les Forces cannot be summarised; it must be experienced and it imposes itself with raw evidence, alternately playful, fulminating, shattering, ethereal, stupefying."
- Liberation
