Contrapuntal songs of love-hate, a book of implacable symmetry, Local people exposes a familiar, implicit contemporary populated by professional artists, innovative entrepreneurs and well-educated people. It tells the story of a radical social universe that becomes ours, intensely ours, a total culture that we almost dominate and thus escape us. It offers us what we expect: easy pleasures, friendly beauty, corrected reason, naked emotion, cutting-edge characteristics or infinite competence - a world we have wanted, wished for, desired, for which we fight every day and where success, triumph, surpassing oneself are the order of the day.
These are lives as we say: light and holy, grey, stormy, crazy, enjoyable. Living legends. And it is above all the hearts of men and women in our image, Michèle, Thomas, Vasken or Rosalie, who, whether they are rebellious writers, compulsive salesmen, lacklustre accountants or exhausted general practitioners, will all bear witness to a deep-seated oblivion, a founding pain, a kind of central mourning that no air of time will be able to dissipate.
