Never Mind [French edition]

I’ll be honest: *Never Mind* frustrated me at first. The opening scenes drop you into the middle of a battlefield with no handholding—no names, no clear stakes, just the acrid smell of gunpowder and a narrator who might be lying to himself (and you). But that’s the point. Gwenaële Robert isn’t interested in orienting you; she’s replicating the disorientation of a man whose identity is as shaky as the republic he’s supposedly fighting for. The prose is dense with historical detail, but it’s the *gaps*—the things left unsaid—that haunt you. A character’s face is described in meticulous detail, only for the narrator to admit three pages later he might’ve imagined it. It’s maddening. Brilliant, but maddening. Nicolas Djermag’s performance is the glue holding this fragmentation together. His delivery is *physically* unsettling—he’ll start a sentence in a gravelly baritone, then let it trail off into a whisper, as if the narrator’s own conviction is evaporating mid-thought. The production amplifies this with subtle, jarring sound design: a distant drumroll that might be real, or might be a migraine; a crowd’s cheer that morphs into a scream. My biggest critique? The pacing drags in the middle, where Robert’s philosophical digressions (on fate, on free will) start to feel like naval-gazing. And the ending—well, let’s just say if you need closure, look elsewhere. But if you want an audiobook that *feels* like standing too close to a cannon’s blast—dazed, deafened, and weirdly exhilarated—this is it.