Mémoires d'un jeune homme dérangé

Rights sold
Bulgaria (Pulsio)
Germany (Rowohlt)
Italy (Vague)
Lithuania (Tyto Alba)
Romania (Pandora-M)
Russia (Azbooka-Atticus)
Turkey (Dogan Kitapçilik)

Presentation

For Marc, Paris is a feast. But though he wants to believe that life might be a feast as well, Marc isn’t sure that such a feast can make for a fulfilling life. Suffice to say, love is on its way...

A young man from a good family, rather snobbish as can be expected, Marc Marronnier is an inveterate party animal whose greatest exploit has been to combine the personal and the professional: he is a gossip columnist. Along with his best friend Jean-Georges and their group of friends known as the ricaneurs pantalonnés (a term from the French translation of Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, when in the original English text he writes, “who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer?”), Marc sets out to methodically hop from one alcohol- and drug-fueled Parisian party to the next. Which doesn’t prevent him from making a life with a woman named Victoire – a tall, beautiful millionaire who also goes out every night herself and never asks questions when Marc gets home even later than her.

One day, as Marc is flipping through a comic book in a bookstore, a bomb explodes in the art book section. He sees a young woman, Anne, covered in blood that he believes at first is dead. Alas she is not. Their eyes meet and Marc falls in love. He becomes focused on one thing: finding Anne again. This task proves to be less difficult than he imagines. Meanwhile, Victoire makes things easier for Marc by dumping him.

He feels quite awkward around Anne, believing that he is constantly disappointing her. To forget about his failure, he goes with his buddies to a ball in Vienna but it does no good; he comes back even more in love with her. He can’t stop himself from following her everywhere. And then one day, without quite understanding why, she approaches him and their story together finally begins.

But it isn’t easy. Continuing their frenetically-paced nightlife, the couple finds itself on the verge of breaking up several times. It’s only when he brings Anne to Prague, smack dab in the middle of the Velvet Revolution, that Marc finally understands the revolution taking place inside himself: he loves someone who can bring fullness to his life. And he decides to embark on a new phase of his life, leaving his old partying bachelor days behind.

Prominent personality in Paris night life and former advertising executive, Frédéric Beigbeder is now a literary critic, editor and author. His novels Windows on the world and 99 FF, adapted for the cinema in 2007, have been a great success and have been translated into numerous languages. Mémoires d’un jeune homme dérangé is his firt novel.