Adventure cafes
“After three years of khâgne, a lamentable failure in the competition for the Ecole Normale Supérieure and a year spent in a company of Funeral Directors, I left on foot from Paris to Jerusalem. This first trip, recounted in Tom Sawyer Syndrome, took me six months. Having taken a liking to the thing, I left a year later with my cousin for a fifteen-month journey around the world. On the program: crossing Europe and Russia in a Peugeot 204. Visiting Japan. Then crossing North America by bike, from Vancouver to Costa Rica.
We would have extended the adventure well beyond if the pandemic had not decided otherwise. We left France soaked in literature and philosophy, which I do not recommend to anyone, because of all the intoxications, that caused by big words is by far the most dangerous, although its effects are more diffuse. We didn't have to wait for Vladivostok to understand that the world, since Nicolas Bouvier, had changed a lot. Hence the inevitable disappointments that I had the pretension to relate in A year on the road (Ecuador editions, readers' prize from the city of Dijon and special mention from the jury at the 2022 Adventure Screens). "
Editor's Note
Two young people of today, two friends who dream of detachment and bliss. They are in their twenties and have already traveled across Europe on foot to Israel (see Tom Sawyer Syndrome by Samuel Adrian). But they need the world.
They then decide to set off to discover it at the wheel of an antique Peugeot 204, older than them, loaded with bottles of wine and books to their satisfaction. A car for the less unsuited to the tracks of the taiga that they will have to face...
They leave France by the east, cross Germany, Serbia, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Japan, then reach the United States where they come across a country in full confinement. The trip to the great outdoors then becomes a journey of interiority. A journey of fifteen months, but also a story of friendship aboard a steed that threatens to faint and provokes immense bursts of laughter.
Half a century after Nicolas Bouvier, these XNUMXst century beatniks are blazing the trail like others retire to a monastery or ashram. They retreat into the movement with only mantras: do not waste time and focus on the essentials.
In this book which, by its style and the intensity of its spiritual journey escapes the banality of travelogues, wisdom is the holy grail sought by these fiery adventurers who feel alienated from the sad and empty infatuations of our half-virtual world. . Like Beckettian characters, they wonder about the absurdity of this ideology: should we travel at all costs?
See you Tuesday March 14, 2023 at 20 p.m.
La Guilde, 7 rue Pasquier, 75008 Paris, metro Madeleine
