Luc Blanvillain, Eux deux, Quidam Éditeur, April 3, 2026, 242 pages, €19
Death on the Sofa and the Mise en Abyme
On April 1st, Basile Brantôme, forty years old, dies while seated on his couch, taking on the visage of Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role of a rebellious 1980s detective, a bomber jacket and a gold chain completing the image. With his friend Grégoire Frédol, he created Eux deux, a hit series that has, for ten seasons, chronicled the lives of two scriptwriters busy drafting a show. A man of the trade, Basile judges the entry onto the stage as hackneyed, and the visitor, good-humored, improvises a crueller variant. Basile must decide who should die—Grégoire or himself—and deliver his answer on May 1st, Labour Day, a day when death, alas, is at work. For a full month, the intruder keeps insinuating himself everywhere and grows fond of the life he comes to reclaim. At Quidam Éditeur, Luc Blanvillain crafts a metaphysical comedy, chopped up like a serial, into dated episodes.
Death on the Sofa and the Mise en Abyme
The novel and the series share the same title, a mirror of reflections on which the entire machinery of the book rests. The next day, Basile sells Grégoire the death sentence as the pitch for the following season, and the two collaborators script their lives as they unfold before them. Luc Blanvillain thus replays the Scheherazadean ruse—telling stories to buy time—and lends to Death the vocation of an apprentice screenwriter. Readable at will, she quotes Pascal, warns her client against generic phrases, demands twists, and even auditions for her own part, only to be dismissed for excessive resemblance to Belmondo. From this vertigo emerges a lively satire of an era that converts every moment into content, from focus groups to the virtual coach at the end of life.
Twin Minds and the Third Person
Basile and Grégoire form a tandem that peddles in unison, a twinship the series hints at from time to time through mirrors and vases adorned with Dioscures. The dilemma frays this harmonious accord and tests Basile’s self-proclaimed “good guy” image. The author draws from it scenes where emotion outruns laughter, where two modest men invent new gestures, a hand sliding for the first time into the other’s hair, an arm supporting a friend to the chair. Grégoire, a hypochondriac on anxiolytics, gains an unsuspected gravity. Re-reading No Exit in their own way, the two friends lodge Hell in the third person, which here bears the name Doris, their director, and the looming deadline accelerates what Basile’s timidity had postponed. The lovers’ desire takes the code name of a horse race, which the narrator slyly links to the cattleya between Odette and Swann.
The formidable independent house Quidam Éditeur, based in Meudon, has been supporting the writer since Le Répondeur, published in 2020, and here releases its fifth title. Brassens, in the epigraph, closed the grand ball of the four arts to open the era of real farewells, and Luc Blanvillain reopens the floor for one more waltz, led by Death in a bomber jacket, whose cadence is so precise that we follow, won over, until the poet takes the floor again.
The Final Spring and the Living
For a long time, Basile absorbed events with something of a delayed broadcast, and the countdown flings him into the present. He, who had lacked physical presence, climbs—Bebel’s force in action—a Sophora, then a wall, to rescue a child from the flames, before walking home on foot, along the edge of Parc Montsouris, among Japan’s cherry trees and the terraces where the living laugh. Luc Blanvillain captures this rebirth of a sentence—child-sized—in a moment of awakening: “He possessed feet; those feet carried him; there was the city.” As he reconnects with his parents, former horticulturists of Orry-la-Ville, the laughing son reproaches himself for having mocked the rebellious singers his mother cherished, and learns to read tenderness beneath his father’s stormy brows. Wedded to the imperfect subjunctive and to wordplay, the novelist’s prose shifts from burlesque to elegy with a single word.
The remarkable independent house Quidam Éditeur from Meudon has supported the writer since Le Répondeur, published in 2020, and here presents the fifth title. Brassens, cited in the opening, closed the great dance of the arts to open the time for true funerals, and Luc Blanvillain reopens the floor for one more waltz, which Death, in a bomber jacket, conducts with a spark so precise that we follow, captivated, until the poet finds his voice again.
The article Eux deux, a hilarious and biting satire of the world of television series, first appeared on Lythrum Press.
