Requiem

A novel

A child grows up and rebels against centuries-old patriarchy. She meets idealists at work from the fringes of society to the highest levels of the State. But appetite for power, wild capitalism and the recasting of extremes are already shaping the 21st century.

Through seemingly unrelated destinies, the novel recounts the genesis of our era and asks us these essential questions that we brush aside with a wave of the hand due to lack of awareness, time or courage: is equality possible? And how can it be built when language itself works to prevent it?

Requiem is the first French novel written in a neutral gender. It overturns the codes of grammar and literature to take up one of the greatest challenges facing humanity: building a fairer language and world.

Publisher’s Review

The dream of a “complete” book, incredibly daring: Requiem is above all a transgenerational novel. It not only pays tribute to youth struggling against a future devoid of meaning, but also to the adults that young people become without resigning themselves to slavery.

Set against a quarrel between the sexes, the novel’s philosophical proposition rehabilitates individual conscience in a civilization that no longer has faith in anything, where dangerous ideologies and religions fill the void.

At a time when serial killers have become our heroes, Requiem sings of the advent of a new world, recalling that the nobility of humanity consists in pursuing utopias and that word and meaning are at the beginning of everything.

Author’s Note

When I started writing, I discovered that my language failed to fulfill its main function: to express my thoughts. Because this language, with its hierarchy between grammatical genders, perpetuates mechanisms of power at work in society. A choice was therefore imposed on me: write in this language, or resist.

If I discovered that words were not innocent, I also discovered their power. Today, more and more people are creating new words and new uses that are neither masculine nor feminine. Through the new concepts they express, these new words contribute to changing the world.