Juliette Mézenc, the life of nitrogen

"A novelist would never put a dead cow in the path of a character who spends most of his time looking at dead bodies, and this at the very moment when he is trying to get some fresh air, never." All the more reason to do so, then. Having discovered a bovine with its four feet in the air during a walk, the narrator begins to collect skulls. Her parents "put her in the country" because she was taking a bit too much drugs and gave her a microscope: to her the joys of the infinitely small and the meaning of life, by dint of ogling amoebas for whom "the fact of having neither head nor ass nor personality of their own did not seem to worry them at all or even interest them."

Bassoléa speaks like a character from Thomas Bernhard or Samuel Beckett, quite angry with the adult world and determined to do and study absolutely anti-productivist things, to create a sort of almanac whose sole subject would be "breathing" - this almanac was in fact published three years ago by Editions de l'Attente, under the title Cahiers de Bassoléa , with exercises like "Repeat to yourself 'I am a plate of noodles' until you become noodles, well-cooked noodles, soft and slippery, heavy at the bottom of the bed."

Bassoléa or Grass in the Belly is a very joyful and very open text, half satire, half visionary experience. We meet a singer who sings without stopping and "old poets […]