Noé

Between the depths and the heights, despair and resilience, this is the powerful story of a journey towards life.
On 14 September 2014 at 2 pm, whilst on a mountaineering expedition, 18-year-old Noé and his godfather, Damien, suffered a fatal fall on the Bonne Pierre glacier. Simon, Noé’s brother, is 19 years old.
In five acts that echo the biblical flood, Simon recounts the stages of grief and his own journey of initiation. Following the tragedy, walking, celebration, friendship, art and then travel enable him to return to life and solid ground, till Simon decides to settle in the valley where the fall occurred. The peace is short-lived: in 2024, the terrible floods of the Bérarde strike. In a matter of hours, an entire village is partially engulfed by torrential waters, originating from the very same glacier where Noé fell.
The tragedy rekindles Simon's memories and serves as a reminder of the merciless cycle of mountain life. Spatial and emotional upheavals, the history of the landscape and of the family, contemporary settings and biblical references are deeply intertwined. Decades earlier, Armenian ancestors driven from their lands saw in this remote mountain range a reflection of Mount Ararat—a symbol of the lands they had left behind—and named the family chalet after it.

The mountain thus shifts from a theatre of drama to a refuge, from an idealised place to a territory that is inhabited, lived in and experienced. But in this age of global warming, this landscape is undergoing a dangerous transformation. What remains of the memory of those who have died at high altitude, when the mountains that commemorate them are crumbling?
A neo-diluvian coming-of-age novel, an Anthropocene tale, Noé is an autobiographical, intimate and poetic narrative—the story of a man whom the mountains first destroyed, then saved. Whilst evoking a triple deluge (a bereavement, an exodus, a flood) and a triple loss (a brother, a country, a village), it reveals the light that emerges after tragedy, the beauty of the days that sometimes follow cataclysms, and the peace that remains in the aftermath of the storm.