Boris Barail

From the very first pages, Eïon presents himself as an elementary consciousness, the living memory of light and a witness to the emergence of the cosmos. Immortal and omnipresent, he moves through the first forms of matter, then through living things, becoming both observer and actor in the history of the Universe.

The story is built in fragments, following an openly non-linear logic. Each incarnation becomes a self-contained scene: Eïon passes through the great figures and key moments of human history. From Lucy to Newton, from the excesses of Caligula to the ambitions of Napoleon, from the orgasms of Messalina to the flashes of insight of Einstein, from Frankenstein’s experiments to the divine and libidinous impulses of Amenhotep III. In turn he explores science, power, desire, creation and destruction. He is always very pretentious and plays his incarnations with a great deal of humor.

As these journeys unfold, a coherence emerges. Eïon discovers that matter keeps the trace of everything it passes through. Inspired in particular by the work of Jean-Émile Charon, the novel develops the idea of a fundamental memory inscribed at the very heart of matter, where consciousness and energy merge.

This exploration takes on a special dimension in the chapters devoted to the great scientific discoveries. Newton, then Einstein, appear as tipping points. Light, first perceived as a unity, turns out to be multiple. Gravity, first thought of as a force, becomes a relationship, almost an emotion. Through them, Eïon understands that the laws of physics express a form of bond between beings and things.

At the same time, the story deliberately drifts into irreverence and chaos. Eïon, a lucid and provocative narrator, blends the sacred and the profane, scientific rigor and the most carnal urges, revealing a humanity traversed by the same fundamental forces as matter.

As the text unfolds, the figure of Boris, the author, appears as a relay. Eïon passes through him to tell this story, blurring the boundaries between narrator, characters and writer.

Everything converges on a central intuition: light does not break down, it reveals itself. And it is transmitted. Gravity is not merely a law, but a form of universal relationship that binds all things together.

As the story progresses, Eïon no longer merely observes: he understands that he is himself the link, the messenger and the trace. Through his incarnations, a form of consciousness emerges, where science, memory and intimate experience come together.

The novel ends on a dizzying opening: what if the Universe had neither beginning nor end? And what if the memory Eïon has carried since the origin were only one interpretation among others? But far from closing the story, this uncertainty becomes an invitation: to look at the world differently, as a living fabric of relationships, light and memory.

The Odyssey of My Electrons thus offers a journey that is both cosmic and deeply human, most often with humor, in which the reader is invited, in turn, to question their place in the Universe and the invisible bond that ties them to everything.

Five children grow up. Joséphine, the eldest, who keeps a black notebook and the household. Mireille, the proofreader, who reads everything and says nothing about her traumatic abortion. Nicole, the devout one, who counts everything. And the twins André, the draftsman, and Paul, who reads Plato. Between themselves they speak two secret languages, euçapoite and later pitwood. They share fromage blanc to the milligram on a scale and fall out for eleven days over a marble. The fairies they have invented protect them and help them reconcile. Teatime at Aunt Émilie’s lets them give free rein to their pranks, playing with the elevator, in particular to frighten the Italian neighbor, Madame Melenotte.

A few days after receiving from Marie-Jeanne the offer of a position, Berthe, the countess’s chambermaid, falls down a service staircase and dies instantly. The case is closed.

In 1898, in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, Mireille, pregnant by Lucien, a typesetter at L’Aurore, leaves the house and will not return for eight years. Guillaume, now a teenager, comes every Saturday to buy two small loaves from Léonie, the baker who sings off-key. He watches from afar the workshop of the father he does not know he has and where he will end up as an apprentice. He does not get along with his official father, the Count of Gransac. One day the count takes his son to the brothel to initiate him. At eighteen, the twins also go to the brothel for the first time and come back with crabs.

The war of 1914 does not separate the twins. André loses two fingers at Verdun. Paul, who had tried to get himself discharged by faking a right cervico-brachial rheumatic neuralgia, refuses to shoot his friend Marius, condemned for desertion: three months in prison, and Marius is shot anyway. The false armistice of 7 November 1918 leaves two armies, for one afternoon, shaking hands. After the war, Guillaume marries Geneviève, Joséphine’s daughter, without knowing she is the granddaughter of his own father. Geoffroy dies in 1923 in the middle of a sentence: “I am the… I had… There is…” The children immediately quarrel over a salon and a mirror that, under the deceased’s will, may not be moved.

The years go by. Marie-Jeanne dies facing the mirror, a basket of letters on her lap. Guillaume cheats on Geneviève with Hélène, who gives him a daughter, Ségolène. Paul dies run over by a De Dion-Bouton while watching the swifts fly. Under the Occupation, Jean-Louis, Joséphine’s husband, dies at the table, poisoned with digitalis. Geneviève killed him so that he would not tell Guillaume about the consanguinity in their marriage. Joséphine, to cover for her daughter, writes to the prefect accusing herself, and the case is closed without further action.

In 1952, Ségolène, now a clerk to an auctioneer, comes to appraise the house and senses something behind the mirror. Mireille, now old, reads her sister’s notebook, waits for ten years to pass and for the law to be unable to do anything, then forces Geneviève to confess everything to Guillaume. In 1957, the expropriation of the block forces the mirror to be taken down: behind it, the letter written by Geoffroy in 1888. In Marie-Jeanne’s basket, another, from the dying countess, who confesses to Berthe’s murder and her brief affair with Geoffroy. Guillaume learns all at once that he is the son of the mirror-maker who is also his employer, the husband of his niece, and the father of a young woman with long black lashes.

Paris, 1958.

At Guillaume’s, after the move from rue de Charonne caused by the expropriation of the unhealthy block, the mirror is placed in the great salon, facing the twin mirror that Geoffroy had made for his mother. A hook gives way and the rue de Charonne mirror, which knows the whole history of the Grandjean family, shatters into a thousand pieces.

Each takes a shard.

The inkwell, for its part, is full: it waits.

A family saga, funny, tender and dark, where nothing is ever said in full, and where everything ends up being known.