L'homme que je ne devais pas aimer par Agathe Ruga

Abstract

Reviewed by: L'homme que je ne devais pas aimer par Agathe Ruga Araceli Hernández-Laroche Ruga, Agathe. L'homme que je ne devais pas aimer. Flammarion, 2022. ISBN 978-2-0802-7889-0. Pp. 208. To what extent can a nomadic or shifting family dynamic experienced as a little girl influence the adult love choices of Ariane, the novel's thirty-five-year-old protagonist living in Burgundy? Repeated family patterns loosely thread together the main plot in the post-pandemic novel by French author Agathe Ruga, L'homme que je ne devais pas aimer. Outwardly, Ariane, a beautiful woman, enjoys an idyllic life as an in-demand writer, blogger, and literary influencer, mother of three young children, and wife to a handsome, caring, and successful husband. Yet, these markers of status stir emptiness. For instance, Ariane depicts her children in an anonymous and amorphous manner as almost décor in her unhappy marriage and unfulfilling motherhood. Ariane manifests the same restlessness that her mother exhibited throughout her meandering childhood, especially once divorced from her aloof father. Ariane sought validation, recognition, and a sense of family, identity, belonging, and ultimately love from the men that her seductive mother dated. The novel begins with Ariane's first-person narration foreshadowing the consequences of bad choices attributed to a sort of disease of the heart and soul: "je suis tombée amoureuse comme on tombe malade" (10). Since Ariane begins her story by dismissing her own agency, the reader already knows that the ensuing pages will unravel a train wreck of sorts that relies on her reluctant yet stubborn self-imposed passivity. Ariane confesses, "Il m'a regardée, c'est tout. Dans ses yeux, dans leur promesse et ma renaissance, j'étais soudain atteinte d'un mal incurable ne laissant présage rien de beau ni de fécond" (10). Her consuming love object is Sandro, a barman ten years younger, who is feisty, economically unstable, emotionally unavailable, and notably less physically attractive than her husband. Longing to recreate a similar relationship that had consumed her own mother, Ariane obsesses over Sandro, the classic "bad boy" and forbidden fruit. During Ariane's coming-of-age years, the presence of Lolo, her mother's paramount lover, proved to be formative in her own identity. Lolo's abrupt departure from their lives continues to haunt Ariane's sense of self, especially in her relationships to other men. Like Sandro, Lolo was also ten years younger than his lover was. Lolo's parents vehemently disapproved of his passionate relationship with a divorced mother. When Lolo unexpectedly vanished, Ariane inherited an obsession for serial ardent affairs in her quest for love, purpose, healing, or fixing: "nous nous raccrochons aux bribes, pour comprendre ou réparer" (199). Ariane internalized her maternal grandmother's pursuit of love as what matters most, and not comfort, stability, or peace. The separation imposed by the pandemic in 2020, "l'année où l'humanité a cessé de se toucher […] où toute fuite était impossible" (125), forcing Ariane into a suffocating lockdown with her husband and children, could not cure her of the insatiable yearning to [End Page 247] escape her young family. Sandro's gaze functioned as "la goupille d'une grenade" (10) that could devastate nuclear bonds if she so allowed. Still, Lolo, and not Sandro, may be the man Ariane should have never loved in the first place. [End Page 248] Araceli Hernández-Laroche University of South Carolina Upstate Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French