A singularity
French, Actes Sud, 2024
“I try not to freak out, I tell myself that the world is full of coincidences, one more, one less. Except that a probability like this is forbidden. If I calculated it, if I knew how to calculate it, it would be so small, with dozens of zeros after the decimal point, it would be ridiculous. The things that we cannot reasonably imagine should be forbidden by a law of nature or by the constitution: so that we can avoid this kind of situation, avoid the day when press conferences are organised around the globe to present the first photo of a black hole while I observe the hole inside myself for the first time.”
“A singularity” traces the hallucinatory journey of a young man connected to a black hole. Bastien Hauser’s writing is representative of a generation fully alight. It depicts the protagonist’s thirst for the absolute as he is sucked into oblivion, into the sky and into the night.
On 10 April 2019, Abel Fleck’s life, and perhaps the whole world, is turned upside down by a coincidence: he suffers a stroke and a spot appears in his brain and on his medical scans – while simultaneously , scientists manage to photograph a black hole for the first time, proving the existence of this fascinating celestial object. It becomes clear to Abel that the haematoma on his medical scans is directly linked to M87*, the monstrous star that has begun to obsess him. In other words, Abel has a black hole in his head.
Though he won’t admit it to anyone, whole days disappear from his memory and he plunges into obsessive research into astrophysics and the history of scientific breakthroughs in the field. His frenetic social life, that of a generation which no longer believes in the future, is both captive and unleashed in parties, drunkenness, drugs, the fusion of bodies, unconditional friendship and voracious nocturnal consumption. Madness overtakes him – but is his madness paranoid or hyperlucid?
Between a longing for nothingness and a desire for intensity, the protagonist pursues his fiery course, further and further from his initial centre of gravity. He flees Brussels, his apartment destroyed by the shards of his madness, and his friends and family, leaving them in the anguish of an unexplained disappearance. Without knowing why or how, he ends up in Tucson, where he attends the Arizona International Astrophysics Convention, and then sets off into the desert with a few loose acquaintances who immediately become a group of inseparable friends, to observe the next solar eclipse. Along the way, and on every page of the book, narrative tension is generated by Abel’s oscillating between a fusional, cosmic vision of reality and the irreversible loneliness of a being lost to himself.
The verve of the long sentences and the mastery of free, direct speech make for easy, fast and absorbing reading, even if the motifs and situations are often repeated and the non-events hallucinated by the character may seem more numerous than the real events of the story. A book that provides warmth, translating the troubled feelings and existential confusion of a young adult in the manner of a dizzying, cosmic phenomenology. A first novel that, like the accretion disc of a black hole, swirls passionately around an unfathomable centre.
Text by Alice Bottarelli
- Title
- Une singularité
- Publisher
- Actes Sud
- Translation rights
- Nathalie Alliel, nathalie.alliel@actes-sud.fr
- Publication date
- March 2024
- Pages
- 272
- ISBN
- 2330189516
Author
Bastien Hauser
Bastien Hauser is a writer and director. A member of the Et cætera collective, he is committed to the dissemination of living, oral literature. Born in Switzerland in 1996, he graduated with a master’s in Text and Creative Writing from La Cambre and is a laureate of the Playwriting Laboratory of the Société Suisse des Auteurs. His work has been performed and read in Switzerland, France, Belgium and Canada. Bastien lives in Brussels.
Photo: © Elise Comte