Video - We read "La Villa" by Brigitte Benkemoun, the superb fantasy of the bailiff

A story about the vagaries of transmission and a love song for a futuristic villa in the Arles region, Brigitte Benkemoun's new book is as fascinating as it is moving.

" In what state am I wandering?" It is in response to this nothing less than metaphysical hoax that the journalist and writer Brigitte Benkemou wrote "La Villa".

Let's summarize the case. She was about to enter adolescence when this daughter of Algerian pieds-noirs Jews moved in 1974 with her two brothers and her parents into a huge villa of "disheveled" modernism, as if born from the unnatural love affair of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. It was built at the request of her father by the architect Emile Sala , not far from Arles where Pierre Benkemoun practiced the austere profession of bailiff while Simone, his wife, initially a teacher, now happily devoted herself to her life as a housewife.

That says it all about the founding strangeness of this story. "It just takes a little time to get used to it, to tame the space, to understand, and partly to accept, that a house changes the way others see you, and that it transforms you too. We hadn't just moved. We had changed our appearance, our posture, our social position, going from a fairly ordinary residential alley, a middle-class neighborhood without any rough edges, to the camp of the rich and, even worse, the eccentric."

In any case, some forty years later, feeling his end and that of Simone approaching, Pierre will bequeath the Villa Benkemoun to his daughter, who will at first not know what to do with it before finding, after a thousand difficulties, the answer: a book. So it will be "The Villa" and it will be magnificent.

The Villa was designed in the time of Pompidou, the Concorde, girls in Courrèges and Knoll furniture.

Where it would have been logical to expect an art book (after all, the sumptuousness of the whole lends itself largely to it), here comes literature, in all modesty. That is to say, something like the story of our lives and that of a country, ours therefore, taken at the precise moment when it still does not know that it will have to stop believing in a bright future. A time when even the provincial bourgeoisie could indulge (rarely, it is true, but still...) in the voluptuousness of modernism.

What is it about Pierre, this man who prides himself on carrying out his professional duties with all rigor, on being "square" as one should be, that will lead him to this gentle "madness" all curves, concrete and voluptuousness? The era then, or perhaps also, unconsciously, the hedonistic memory of the shores of a lost Mediterranean... A few more years and Barthes will write: "All of a sudden it became indifferent to me not to be modern." End of the story and of the enchanted parenthesis.

The Villa was imagined in the time of Pompidou, the Concorde, girls in Courrèges and Knoll furniture; it was not actually inhabited until Giscard and the first oil crisis ... Bad luck, at least for those (now those) who are charged with preserving the spirit of freedom that presided over its conception.

Still, the villa remains. And with it, with this perfect book, the future lasts a long time.

“La Villa”, by Brigitte Benkemoun , ed. Stock, 208 p., €19.50, ebook €13.99.