Grégory Le Floch’s first novel takes us on a frenetic psychological journey, the outcome of which can only be the enunciation of the truth, however unbearable it may be.
A young man flees from France to Germany to take refuge on the edge of the forest in the small hamlet of Hardt. He is fleeing a traumatic event, the thread of which he is struggling to unravel. While he was on holiday with a friend, the latter died in troubled circumstances. From his refuge, he tries to digest the events and find a balance through his continued study of Thomas Mann’s work. He tries to say, to find the words to describe what happened. But everything falls apart when his friend’s mother finds his trail and knocks on his door.
A psychological thriller with Dostoyevskian fever, Dans la forêt du hameau de Hardt depicts the difficulty of saying the horror. Drowning in apnea, or, on the contrary, hiccuping to the rhythm of breathless phrases, the narrator takes us to the darkest heart of his confession.
