Book Review: ‘Live Fast,’ by Brigitte Giraud

LIVE FAST, by Brigitte Giraud; translated by Cory Stockwell

Some of the things we inevitably say to one another in real life are very hard to pull off in fiction. “Had I known then what I know now” is a creative-writing-class blunder that the French writer Brigitte Giraud has nonetheless made central to an autobiographical novel of great formal and emotional urgency. “Live Fast,” which won the Prix Goncourt in 2022, takes its title from a stray cliché by Lou Reed that the narrator finds in a book her husband, Claude, was reading back in 1999, when he was 41, right before he died in a motorcycle accident. Twenty years later, the narrator looks back and tries to piece events together — or, rather, tear them apart in a welter of regret, paranoia, blame and fantasy: all driven by an overbearing “if only.”

“Live Fast” is almost entirely organized around impossible revisions of its own plot. If only Claude, an avid motorcyclist, had not borrowed his brother-in-law’s Honda Fireblade, a bike he had described as “a real bomb. Not to be touched.” If only the narrator had not been so keen to move house, nor allowed her brother to park his Honda in their new garage. If only Tadao Baba, the motorcycle’s Japanese designer, had not devised such a light but powerful machine, banned in his own country but perfectly legal in France. If only Claude had listened to a slightly shorter song in his office before mounting the Fireblade. Larger, metaphysical questions also loom in the narrator’s mind: “It had taken me all this time to find out whether this word, destiny, which I heard people say here and there, had any meaning.”

This makes for a narrative that moves without mercy toward the violent end we know is coming, while at the same time the voice recounting this story is wishing it all away. I was reminded of another French novel, Marie Darrieussecq’s “My Phantom Husband” (1998), in which a woman describes the hours, days and weeks after her partner’s disappearance — a story about the frail possibility that all might be well. A signal difference: In “Live Fast,” which also gives the reader an odd impression of proceeding backward, the widow seems to be wishing not so much for a happy conclusion, but for the end of narrative itself — for a heaven where nothing ever happens. “Stay in your bedroom and keep still. That’s what the voice whispering in my ear was telling me to do,” Giraud writes, paraphrasing Blaise Pascal’s dictum that most of humanity’s problems derive from our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves.

Of course this happy passivity is impossible, and there is no serenity to be found in “Live Fast.” Instead, beneath the “if only” ache, there is a wild desire to know. Even if the narrator could undo all the accidents that preceded her husband’s — “You can look for every possible coincidence, every imaginable sign” — a vexing mystery would remain: What possessed a husband and father, in early middle age, to ride to work that day on something portentously called a Fireblade? Nostalgia for his birthplace of Algeria, where he lived until he was 4? A recklessness not satisfied by his career as a music critic?