> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Deserable-Un-certain-M-Piekielny/956725

> UN CERTAIN M. PIEKIELNY, par François-Henri Désérable (Gallimard, 2019, Poche, 288 pages). — À quinze ans, Évariste Galois découvre les mathématiques ; à dix-huit, il les révolutionne ; à vingt, il meurt en duel. Il a connu Raspail, Nerval, Dumas, Cauchy, les Trois Glorieuses et la prison, le miracle de la dernière nuit, l'amour et la mort à l'aube, sur le pré.
C'est cette vie fulgurante, cette vie qui fut un crescendo tourmenté, au rythme marqué par le tambour de passions frénétiques, qui nous est ici racontée.
—Johnny Gimenez (Culturebox)

When I bought the book, I vaguely imagined a literary inquiry in the vein of Mondiano's perambulations that would lead one in the footsteps of the title character, A certain Mr. Piekielny. No less satisfying, the book turned out to be an investigation, not so much into the life of an obscure personality encountered on the pages of Romain Gary's book, "La promesse de l'aube," but an investigation into the porous boundaries between fiction and reality.

The narrator, who is generally identified with the author, but who should not be always taken at his word, recounts his initiation into literature that starts with a near-obsession with Romain Gary's book, the only required reading the he seems to have read in high school. Read, and re-read, and re-read. Intrigued by the character of Mr. Piekielny, a neighbor of the five-year-old Roman Kacew back in Vilnius before the war, Désérable decides to learn more about him. Real-life research, on the Internet and in archives, seems to lead to a dead-end, or at best, leave the researcher in the same state of uncertainty and suspension from which he started. The existence of a certain Mr. Piekielny is ... far from certain. More productive turn out to be Piekielny's possible lives and possible fates. Through his multiple deaths and impossible survivals, Piekielny, whose name means "Infernal" in Polish, comes to embody the fate of Vilnius Jews.

The reader may feel at times that the author's flights of fancy are mere page filler, intended to turn a novella into a novel, and the occasional levity of tone, evocative of Romain Gary's own sense of humor (albeit slightly less successful), might reinforce this first impression. However, these false trails and red herrings do serve a purpose: they explore the boundaries between fact and fiction, true and false memories, the phenomenon of memory formation (the writers', and their readers'), the experiential value of fictional memories, as well as intersections between various literary works.

Désérable manages to pull off a narrative that is touching, sometimes funny (like Gary in Promesse de l'aube, the author is often the target of his own humor), and literarily-savvy, albeit sometimes historically naive (such as, the Soviets as the unquestionable liberators... Historical events feel rather glossed over and perhaps slightly under-researched, in contrast to biographical data, where the author manages to unearth little known bits of trivia). Like Gary's Promesse de l'aube, Désérable's Un certain Mr. Piekielny is also meant as an exploration of the genesis of the compulsion to write. ( )