The smell after the rain | Cédric Sapin-Defour

It's a story of love, life and death. What other tripod has literature been dancing on for centuries? In His Smell After the Rain, this tripod, moreover, is unstable because it unites two beings who do not belong to the same species: a man and his dog. A Bernese Mountain Dog who, as he grows up, takes an ever more essential place in the narrator's life in every sense of the word.

Ubac, that's his name (the search for the right name is an adventure in itself), is not the central character of this book, Cédric Sapin-Defour, his ma it, even less. Besides, he doesn't want to be seen as a ma a traitor. The hero is their bond. This unique, obvious bond and, for those who have explored it, surpasses so many other relationships. This link is illegible and useless for those to whom the company of dogs means nothing. Over the course of thirteen years of living together, the reader is invited to oscillate between the conviction of some and the incomprehension or even repulsion of others; But you don't have to be a man with dogs to be caught up in this story, because if such an exchange is inimitable, it is just as universal. Some pages, Ubac stinks of the dog, the next, we forget that he is one and we observe these two beings loving each other tout simplement.

It's all about love. An uncertain love, without an answer but which, without words, keeps us on the edge of our seats. It's about life. An intense, worried and laughing life where everything goes faster and that you have to remember. It is indeed death that we are talking about. That thing we wouldn't want, but which gives existence all its substance. And that damn thing is missing. Those scratches you think you can hear on the floor and that smell, despite the rain, gone forever.