L'oiseau

The sky is full of old stars that are now extinct, that we still see even though they are no longer there. The sky is cold, and it is from those glacial heights that the narrator - a successful painter - addresses the reader. He could almost be taken for a sort of star lost in the darkness. A dead star that once shone. But there's no point in continuing to shine when inside, everything died long ago. This is a book about stars and flying, about birds and wine. It is also about the narrator's grandfather; surely it is because as a child, the he saw his grandfather fly away, leave earth thanks to wine, that he wanted as an adult to go the same way: to drink wine and live above everything. Far from the destinies of men. It's so hard to be a man, to become one and to stay one.An actor and a translator, Pierre Charras, has published about ten novels. His latest book, Dix-neuf secondes, was published by Mercure de France and received the Fnac prize for literature in 2003.