Que ta bouche me couvre de baisers, by Antoine Vigne

Que ta bouche me couvre de baisers (May your mouth cover me with kisses): a lovely title for a novel both sensitive and erudite. In his second novel, Antoine Vigne invites us to follow Damien back to Arles to finalize placing his father Joris in a nursing home. Joris is a complex man consumed by forgetting, desperately clinging to a rather murky family past.

Damien meets Saïd in the street: a spark, a mutual desire, yet one forced into secrecy. Saïd is not alone; he fled Syria and came to France as a refugee with his wife and children.

In free, star-strewn prose, the text is haunted by many ghosts; past losses and the threat of losses to come shake Damien’s balance.

You can feel the author’s passion for art history and architecture; the text is studded with references.

If France really has its “empty diagonal,” here Antoine Vigne brilliantly draws us a perspective, a geography of desire, of passionate love, but also of grief. An intimate map stretching from Marseille to Montpellier, whose places I was able to inhabit through my own memories.

A wonderful discovery, published by Christian Bourgois.