A first novel with a striking orality about the debt that unites us to those who love us.
The child arrives in its family at the age of five days. At a very young age, love and money were on his mind. Does one owe someone a debt when one has been adopted? From then on, he obsessively counts losses and gains: a pilfered chocolate, a confiscated twenty-dollar bill, the prize from a television game show, gifts to his mother as well as missed acts. But how to find one’s account? How to count to oneself when a gap, a breach, a hole, appears between the memories of childhood and what really was, between his social environment and his new passions? How to fill this hole that represents the first five days of life when one was floating between two names?
Ruthlessly observant, sometimes deadpan and always moving, Le compte est bon is a living well of style. Louis-Daniel Godin tells stories by counting, jumping from number to number, from letter to letter, in order to set the counter at zero, to express the idea of writing a book to get even with life, a book about the impossibility of becoming oneself.
