Hello Gentle Reader
French Literature used to be all the rage. Jean-Paul Sartre was a rock star of his time. He had brought a philosophy of life to the people. He tossed aside notions of scholarly debate about God and the transcendence of the human soul, and instead proclaimed that one should live in the now. That meaning if any is subjective to the beholder. There is no universal grand scheme of it. No power above or God on some mountain, stating that this is the meaning of life. Sartre’s view, meaning is created by the individual. Sartre’s former friend and great thinker Albert Camus, was roughly in the same boat; though completely different and unique in his own right. Both straddled the problem of nihilism and its forceful propagation that there is no such concept of meaning. No meaning to life – just absolute nothingness. In a sense nihilism in its philosophical sensibilities looked at the abyss, and as it looked back, proclaimed the futile meaninglessness of existence. Where Jean-Paul Sartre was an existentialist, Camus was an absurdist. Where Sartre proclaimed that meaning is essential is to existentialism, Camus simply stated that meaning is in a sense part of the great dualism of life itself. The pursuit of personal meaning is not essential but rather a doable choice. Yet both authors died. In a sense the Irish writer and fellow Nobel Laureate in Literature to both authors Samuel Beckett, wrote comical plays that dealt with the absurd meaning and logic of the world. In a way Samuel Beckett picked up the mantle, of the two’s ideas and concepts and used them to depict the comically absurd, of life. Yet even Samuel Beckett died. His later work becoming increasingly minimalist and consequently blurring the lines between what is acceptable as literature and what is pure minimalist joke. In the seventies, there was the “Nouveau Roman,” or “New Novel,” of Alain-Robbe Grillet and others such as Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Butor – as well as the early years of J.M.G Le Clezio and Claude Simon. These writers took up the mantel of their modernist fore fathers, and decided to write towards the experimental and avant-garde. Though it was soon to become simply a fashion statement, and soon fell out of grace with the general reading public. In a sense, the work of these authors; and the early work of J.M.G Le Clezio, were read as the chic literature of the time, they are now simply in a sense artifacts of the literati of the time. There swank has since worn off. In the end it became stepping stone of French literature. Where does that take us today in the world of French letters? Besides the Alain-Robbe Grillet inspired, metaphysical detective novels, and Michel Houellebecq the bad boy of French letters, and a few great French authors here and there; France has since fallen into decline. The days it would appear of Sartre, Camus and the New Novelist, has since disappeared. Former glories of French Literature, that was. Yet there are other authors like Eric Chevillard that have taken up the mantel and prove that France still has something to give.
Pierre Michon than, is a breath of fresh air. I first came across this authors name in two-thousand and twelve, where on one of those internet forums, were discussing possible authors to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Immediately Pierre Michon grabbed my attention. First and foremost he was French. Since I was a young child, and learned that I came from French ancestry, France has always been that cultural paradise that my young mine imagined. Pastries, and castles; museums and paintings. A place far away and completely different than the cultural wasteland of farmers and rednecks, with the occasional transient person, who comes and goes. I often thought of my Grandfather Zenin and Grandmother Aurélie – whose names I bare neither name middle or first; and pondered if they left France, though I know they didn’t. There were second or third generation immigrants. Yet after meeting some Quebec people, I was the one left saying suc le bleu, not to mention that French teacher who made me afraid of the letter R and its rolling sound. So my allegiances changed. However reading that name Pierre Michon, brought back some old feelings of my fantasies of France, back to being. It didn’t take much time at all to locate a book by the author in translation – and it just happened to be from one of my favourite presses Archipelago Books.
“Small Lives,” by Pierre Michon, is his first book. The author has admitted to have written this book “to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis.” It’s a lush book though. Surprisingly for a debut, it was wonderfully and boldly written with a mature hand. It is full of lush prose, and long winded winding sentences, that if not read carefully one can get lost in. Yet in these illuminating poetic sentences there are beautiful jewels. In these small biographies Michon traces the lives of these few mundane and banal individuals; and yet his preoccupations lie more closely with himself. In a sense there is a lot of redemption, which Michon tries to capture or achieve in this book. This “renegade poet,” lost to drunkenness and to writers block, is trying to find a foothold on his own life, and in a sense writes about these small insignificant people, and yet shows how significant they are to the individuals who knew or hold them dear, and to the author himself, who writing about them has turned his pain into energy.
At first this preoccupations and subjects, when referred to in the lines discussing personal history:
“Was one of my ancestors a fine captain, a young, insolent ensign, or fiercely taciturn slave trader? East of the Suez, some uncle gone back to Barbary in a cork helmet, wearing jodhpur boots and a bitter smile, a stereotype warmly endorsed by younger branches of the family, by renegade poets, all those dishonored ones full of honor, shadow, and memory, the black pearls of the family trees? Did I have some colonial or seafaring antecedent?”
At first left me with a sense that this narrator, who is also the author, is slightly conceited. Yet, this quick judgement is pushed aside or rather proven to be insubstantial on its own grounds. These “Small Lives,” or vies miniscules are no more conceited or preoccupied with the narcissistic reflection of oneself, and one’s own personal mythology or history, than any other poet. Yet Michon is not a poet; though in this work he often places both feet into the genres of prose and poetry. Refusing to be classified as auto-fiction, and scoffs at the idea of autobiography or memoir; these vignettes trace personal history and lives and becomes a greater dialogue of personal suffering as an example and understanding of all suffering. Then again that’s a rather pompous assessment, of my own doing.
This is a novel of bittersweet realizations. From Andre Dufourneau, about the young man who left for Africa and never returns, is described in a photograph – and from that photograph a vignette is born:
“Come now, admit it, he really resembles a writer. There is a portrait of a young Faulkner, a small man like him, in which I recognize the same haughty yet drowsy air, the eyes heavy but with an ominous, but flashing gravity, and under the ink-black moustache formerly used to hide the coarseness of the lip, alive like the din silenced by the spoken word, the same bitter mouth that prefers to smile. He moves away from the deck, stretches out on his berth, and there he writes the thousand novels out of which the future is made and which the future unmakes; he is living the fullest days of his life. The clock of rolling waves disguises the hours, time passes and place changes, Dufourneau is as alive as the stuff of his dreams; he has been dead a long time; I am not yet abandoning his shadow.”
The only aspect of Dufourneau that ever returns is some coffee beans in which he sends back. And yet these beans have becomes a relic of his memory – something that has achieved a higher value in the sentimental value than that of monetary worth:
“The coffee was never roasted. Sometimes my grandmother, straightening the back shelf of the cupboard where it was kept, would say, “Here, Dufourneau’s coffee.” She would look at it for a minute, then her look would change, and she would add, “It must still be good,” but in a tone that said, “No one will ever taste this.” … Roasted and consumable, it would have waned, profane, into an aromatic presence; eternally green and arrested at a premature stage in its cycle, it was each day more from the past, from beyond, from overseas; it was one of those things that make the timber of the voice change when speaking of them.”
One of my favourite parts of this book, is the vignette about the boarding school and the brothers in which are at war there. The casual landscape of childhood arbitrary barbaric traditions and customs is well described and wonderful. It fills me with a nostalgic feeling, and understanding of empathy is connected between both reader and character, on a mutual understanding:
“When his tormentors had disappeared, the victim sniffled a little, looked hard at the ground as he adjusted his beret, located his chestnut again in his pocket; the impenetrable brown skin astonished him once more, its smooth, faultless volume gratified him, and leaning into that platitude, painfully, he lost himself there. Everything was like that; impenetrable, closed up in itself, subject to monumental and inscrutable laws; the blind wind seizes the leaves with a passion, tears off the chestnuts and tossing them, shatters and strips them, pushes them out into the world; eyeless, under your own eyes, the chestnut rolls little, comes to a stop.”
This is a delightful book. At times though it felt like it was too clever for its own good. The authors at times dense and brooding voice sometimes gets a bit out of control, and harrowing. Countless sentences and passages of being mocked by the blank white page, virgin white and unmarked pure as the Eucharistic flesh; at times gets a bit old. Yet its densely lyrical poetics is something truly its own, and is beautiful. Another favourite passage is the description of the bishop or priest on his motorcycle:
“Marie-Georgette turned away, the wisteria at her door danced a little, violet against her dress and she too disappeared, in the wide sunlit square only three or four astonished peasants remained, who had not recovered from seeing themselves struck by some many mythologies at once: a motorcycle from a Piaf song had just passed bearing a golden mouthed bishop with the profile of Apollo.”
That’s the France of my fantasy.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
