Samenvatting

This essay discusses the novel Connemara by Nicolas Mathieu. The reader of this journal will immediately wonder why one would devote an essay to a French novel particularly a novel that tells the story of people with optimistic (love) expectations and undergoing the suffering of the disillusions that follow. More specifically, why write an essay in Public Administration about a novel that does not give the impression that there is any connection with this field? Don’t worry, the novel has a lot to offer Public Administration scientists, but for that you have to experience the (love) vicissitudes of the main characters who are dominated in the meantime by fundamental economic and social transformations, by cunning local administrative practices, fanatically reorganising governments, intrusive consultancy firms and unscrupulous consultants. Through his detailed and astute analysis of the everyday lives of ambitious as well as disillusioned middle-aged people, he portrays a France with citizens who have worked very hard in the competitive French education system, have to perform a type of work that offers little satisfaction and where burnout is permanently lurking. He can be seen as a contemporary Tijl Ulenspiegel. At the time, Tijl fooled people by holding up a mirror to them. Nicolas Mathieu does the same by giving the French (and modern society) a distressing view of their own lives.