Olivier Bourdeaut, En attendant Bojangles
Our Reading Journey
An unnamed boy narrates his own childhood from inside an apartment where his parents, Georges and a mother who goes by a different name every single day, have declared permanent war on boredom. They throw parties on weeknights, dance to the same Nina Simone record on loop, refuse to open the mail, and keep a pet crane named Mademoiselle Superfétatoire in the living room. The boy stops going to school without anyone quite deciding it. Beneath the games and the invented names, something in his mother resists being pinned down to a single, steady self, and the record they keep playing, Mr. Bojangles, turns out to be about a dancer who keeps dancing regardless of what has been done to him.
The mother's motto, half game and half warning, is a version of the liar's paradox: she tells her son "I'm lying" and dares him to work out what that means for everything else she's just said. The whole book runs on that same trick. Georges renames his wife daily, invents a past as a harpoon-wielding fly hunter, and turns every ordinary constraint—mail, school, an unwanted guest—into something they can outrun by making it funnier or stranger than it actually is. The reader gets pulled into the same collusion the boy is in: for a long stretch, the parents' inventions read as pure delight, and only slowly do the games start to look like they're covering for something the family can't say out loud. Mr. Bojangles is the tell hiding in plain sight the whole time, a song about someone who keeps dancing because dancing is the only thing left that's still his.
About the Author
Olivier Bourdeaut was born in 1980 in Nantes and was working as a real estate agent there when he lost his job and turned to writing. He wrote En attendant Bojangles in seven weeks while staying with his parents in Spain, and the small independent press Finitude published it in January 2016. It became a word-of-mouth bestseller and swept a run of prizes that year, including the Grand Prix RTL-Lire, the Prix France Culture-Télérama, the Prix Emmanuel-Roblès, and the Prix France Télévisions. It was his debut novel, followed by Pactum salis (2018) and Florida (2021), and was translated into English as Waiting for Bojangles in 2019.
