Brigitte Giraud, the author of more than a dozen novels, won the 2022 Prix Goncourt for Vivre vite. Published in the U.S. under the title Live Fast, this is Giraud's first book to be translated from French to English. The highly autobiographical novel examines the 1999 death of the narrator's 41-year-old husband, Claude, in a motorcycle accident. She writes: "There was only one thing I was truly obsessed with, and I'd kept it secret so as not to frighten those around me... because after two or three years, it would have seemed suspicious if I'd persisted in trying to understand how the accident happened.... My brain had never stopped running wild."
Brief, taut, and tortured, Live Fast begins as the narrator, Brigitte, sells the house she and Claude had been moving into at the time of his death 20 years earlier. Letting the house go is significant, but she has never let go of her confusion and despair over her loss. "The house is at the heart of what caused the accident," she insists, then embarks on a list of hypotheticals, such as "If only I hadn't wanted to sell the apartment," "if only my mother hadn't called my brother to tell him we had a garage," "if only it had rained," and on and on. These wishes form the novel's chapter titles, and Brigitte compulsively dissects each point on a diagram about cause and effect that she's been plotting for years.
In this way, as though she's conducting an incisive postmortem accounting, Giraud analyzes the events that led up to Claude's inexplicable death. Their family--Brigitte, Claude, and their eight-year-old son--were moving house. They got the keys early; they had access to a garage; Brigitte's brother needed to store a motorcycle. Readers are treated to detailed descriptions of the Honda CBR900 Fireblade and Honda's famed engineer Tadio Baba, as well as what song Claude may have chosen to end his final workday with. Giraud even postulates that had Stephen King died--rather than being seriously injured--when he was struck by a minivan in Maine three days before Claude's accident, Claude might have been spared.
This is a novel about obsessive, repetitive investigation: "You rewind and then you rewind again. You become a specialist in causal relationships. You hunt down clues.... You want to know all there is to know about human nature, about the individual and collective springs from which events gush forth. You can't tell if you're a sociologist, a cop, or a writer. You go mad." In examining these large and small, exceptional and mundane events, Giraud maps grief and yearning as much as the tragic death of a beloved husband and father. Cory Stockwell's stark translation blends emotion and analysis in the voice of a woman as bereft as ever. Live Fast is a pained but lucid look at loss in its long term. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: Brigitte Giraud's Prix Goncourt-winning Live Fast is a powerful and concise study of love, loss, and the small decisions and turning points that shape life and death.