Mattéo

Mattéo (Futuropolis) is Jean-Pierre Gibrat’s great historical saga, following his already acclaimed works Le Sursis (The Reprieve) and Le Vol du corbeau (The Flight of the Crow). In Collioure at the beginning of the First World War, Mattéo, the son of Spanish anti-militarist refugees, watches the men of the village leave singing toward a war expected to be brief. A rejected lover, he gradually becomes a witness to the great upheavals of the century—the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Nazism—which challenge his pacifist convictions. Gibrat’s sensual watercolor-style artwork, his luminous heroines, and his almost cinematic soft lighting have made him one of the most recognizable artists in the Ninth Art. The strength of Mattéo also lies in its narrative ambition: following the same man across a quarter-century of historical tragedies and offering readers a rare, sweeping literary journey.