That social networks have changed lives is a repeated truth and so true that it provides the material for the French writer Delphine de Vigan to write her latest novel. This 56-year-old writer, successful in terms of awards and translations, whose novel Based on true events (2016) filmed in Roman Polanski’s film, throws the dice on so-called virtual reality. That’s why the huge topicality of the pages I leave is worrying.

kings of the house (2021) seems to illustrate what he said in an interview before writing: “You are what you choose to look at.” If we are a part of humanity that lives looking fixed on a mobile phone, communicating with invisible beings at the cost of looks and comments, confessing and showing the most personal, the novel touches us. There is no doubt that technology has created a new version of people, confusing the nature of relationships and connections. De Vigan puts his finger on that wound with the story of a girl who sows her affection for the painting by participating in reality showwith whom he enjoys the pleasure of the exhibition and moves towards making his family a permanent thing lives on Instagram and samples on his own YouTube channel.

Through the dynamics of contemporary storytelling, we witness the development of distant existences in two ways: Melany, a future star, and Clare, a diligent and lowly student of the Police School. Ten years later, both will coincide in the investigation of the kidnapping of Kimmy, the daughter of the first, who disappeared from her own garden. That’s how we find out how Melany put together a series of pictures, recording her two children with her mobile phone, and even has her own studio to give her followers the face of a happy family.

Today, Delphine de Vigan makes us think about what we do with social networks.

The disciplined cultivation of this wild exhibitionism brought medium and long-term consequences. Received gifts, money from sponsors and psychological problems, that is, what seemed like a game, a naive dedication to the happiness of the companions, opened huge gaps in the lives of four people over the course of twenty years. The novel questions whether parents have the right to dispose of the image of their children in this way, leave them to the fantasies of anonymous recipients – including pedophiles -, cancel their right to privacy, turn them into public citizens by giving them away. their physiognomy for consumption. widespread.

The novel makes us think about the consequences of constant exposure, as well as the parallel ingestion of audiovisual trifles that perform an unpredictable job in the mental life of people who have already been diagnosed with addiction, fear of being seen, panic stage, sick shyness. Parents who manage the fortunes acquired by precocious children – in the case of Britney Spears, for example – also come from this social vortex that is a combination of capitalism and many technologies. It happened with movie characters, it still happens today acting more easily, even with home control devices.

It is worth noting that literature has always been there, where a metaphor speaks more than a concept, where fiction allows us to freely imagine everything possible. Today, Delphine de Vigan makes us think about what we do with social networks. (OR)