“The hero is the one who, in dangerous circumstances, always survives by killing “: Elias Canetti’s epitaph sets the tone. Killed or being killed, it is the only choice which is offered to the characters of The golden eyes girl, Second novel by Fabrice Jamois, to be published on May 8, 2025, at the La Manufacture des Books.
Margot, the main character, has been locked up for three years in a cellar by a kidnapper who lets her save if she reads him every day from the Balzac. Literature or life, in a way: Margot becomes Pénélope and Shéhérazade at the same time, she patiently awaits her time in front of her executioner.
But his executioner also has a normal life: a family, a teenage son who asks him for the latest fashionable iPhone. By going to buy it at the Opera’s Apple Store in Paris, Margot’s kidnapper will find himself in the middle of an attack perpetrated by radical environmentalists. Bloody for bloody, this former soldier will act in full attack against terrorists, and move to the media of around the world for a hero.
Who are the heroes? Can they be executioners at the same time or successively? It is around this throbbing question that the intrigue of the novel is launched, and will keep the reader in suspense for more than 400 pages. Fabrice Jamois inexorably explores evil in all his seams in this deep darkness work where hidden destinies are breaking up to then behind normality in cardboard.
-The author, professor of philosophy and specialist in the work of Gilles Deleuze, publishes here his second novel, after the magnificent Mycéliumwhich told a dazzling epidemic in a Paris strongly resembling the current Paris. Of a dry, jerky, hyperrealistic and obsessive writing, raw on the edge of scatology, Girl with golden eyes Examine very current themes: the ecological crisis, feminicides, networks that feed the pornographic industry or new technologies. A novel rooted in raw reality, which plunges into its most frightening corners, examined without concession, without eyeshadow and above all, without any manage for the reader. We come out shaken.
“The Girl with Golden Eyes” by Fabrice Jamois, published on the 8th May 2025 by editions Books Manufacture, 454 pages, 21,90 euros
Extract : “In Balzac, Margot found his salvation: his dungeon has become a universe when, for many, the universe is only a dungeon.
Margot is a “masterpiece of nature”. Exceptional, sublime, unique. And it belongs to him. She is her secret garden, an inexhaustible source of dazzling. A wonder that transfigures everyday life and largely compensates for the logistical constraints implied by his stay in the cell. If the pleasure of certain men is to illegally hold animals bought at the black market, Henri has gone much further; He understood, like Balzac, that “love is essentially thief”, and conquered the ultimate freedom, which is to have another freedom. He had the strength to live what others do not even dare to dream of, he appropriated the woman whose beauty has the most moved, as much to tell the truth in a soul and in a body. An overwhelming experience that places him above the others or next to it, and which confirms it in his certainty of being an exceptional individual. Sometimes Henri even has the feeling of touching the condition of the gods, he has more than once dreamed of Hades removing Persephone. In the space where he hosts it, he exercises a limitless power over his guest. He thus had the fantasy to modify his circadian rhythm by creating an artificial cycle of light and darkness of 23 hours, or less, as we do with the hens to bring them to produce more eggs in battery farms. “
