The Book Sill - Ritournelle de la faim

Ritournelle de la faim by J.M.G. Le Clézio

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The splendid opening chapter is dominated by the figure of Uncle Soliman - and as a representation of the French Belle Epoque, is as close to perfection as I have ever read. Everything in this short portrait shows Le Clezio's visual mastery, from the description of the moment (the umbrellas opening like dark flowers, Paris "smoking under the warm rain") to the description of the period (Ravel's Bolero premiering, the Universal Exhibition and its East Asia theme, the colours of the not so far XIXth century so marvelously rendered in the description of the "Maison Mauve").

Unfortunately, Uncle Soliman quickly dies. With his death, we do not only turn the page on the most brilliant period of France and Europe, but also on the most brilliant moment in Le Clezio's novel. From now on, style seems to fault him. The recent French Nobel Prize shows that he knows his topic. However, for someone who on the year following the publication of this book was to receive the most prestigious award in literature, he also shows an inexplicable lack of rigour. He jumps from present to preterit to past perfect in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence. His other characters lack depth to the point of caricature (such are Chemin the coward or the ignominious Talon). His very main character, who we get to understand later may be his mother, grows from the age of twelve to within her twenties without much emotional building. The context itself is weakly rendered : we go through six years of war almost without noticing. The topic of the book itself, hunger, is entirely contained in the description of an old woman scraping rotten fruits and vegetable at a market in Nice around lunch time. It is as if, tackling a personal subject, Le Clezio had found himself at odds with it, not knowing whether to treat it with emotion or detachment, which part to give to the background, whether to engage in the internal conflicts of his character or stay neutral.

All this makes for a readable novel. But from an author at the pinnacle of his production cycle, I was really expecting better.



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The Book Sill - Dans les forêts de Sibérie

Dans les forêts de Sibérie by Sylvain Tesson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is the diary of a thirty-eight-year-old French writer who decides that, for a period of six months, he will stay in a cabin, three meters long by three meters wide, on the shore of lake Baikal. From Winter to Summer, from fear to joy to pain to peace, this short book is a patient and attentive celebration of nature and the instant.

"J'ai été libre, car sans l'autre la liberté ne connaît plus de limite", says Sylvain Tesson at the end of his book. "I have been free, for without the other, freedom knows no more boundary". Very rarely has a book had the power to slow me down and put me in a state of contemplation, "this word that cunning people give to laziness".

This is not a perfect book. But from now on it will travel with me.



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The Book Sill - Kampuchéa

Kampuchéa by Patrick Deville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



After three decades of covering civil wars and coups across the globe, Deville's voice is full of nostalgia, retained emotion and sadness. The mass murderers swarm in our world and Deville sees no sign of it changing:

"La planète défile sous la carlingue et j'essaie de surprendre les progrès de la raison dans l'Histoire et sous mon train d'atterrissage[...] Khieu Samphân, ancien chef d'état du Kampuchéa démocratique, bientôt octogénaire, [...] demande sa remise en liberté pour se consacrer au jardinage. L'ombre de mes ailes glisse sur l'Océan Pacifique. A Ciudad Juarez, dans le nord du Mexique, le chef de cartel Vincente Leyva se fait serrer pendant son jogging. A Lima, le procès de l'ancien président Fujimori suit son cours. L'ombre de mes ailes glisse sur l'Océan Atlantique. A Arusha, le procès des Rwandais suit son cours. A La Haye, le procès des généraux croates Gotovina et Markac suit son cours [...]
On pourrait cesser de lire les journaux."
(Kampuchéa, p.13)

The anger still shows now and then: "Ce cinglé de Daniel Ortéga", "Nous sommes une dizaine de naufragés assis sur des bancs, quelque part sur cette planète comme une grenade dégoupillée dans la main d'un dieu idiot et distrait". But most of it has drowned in resignation.


Through this tone seeps a deep compassion for a certain type of human beings : those who pursue a dream, which they reach or not and which, when reached, turns sour, bitter, nightmarish, their beautiful romantic vision ending up in death: it is Mohout dying of fever in the enchanted Angkor he discovered for Europe; it is Pavie who sacrifices his whole life to the Mekong and the people who live off it ; it is this young Chinese woman he meets by the Red River, who is leaving her village and farm to go to the big City in the hope of a better life. It is, strangely, the three friends from rue Saint-André-des-Arts who dreamt of a Cambodia as seen by Rousseau and who, carried away by their romantic vision, turned it into a bloodbath. Deville has harsh words for the Pol Pot regime. When he talks about the men, his tone becomes more intimate, full of melancholy:

"Cet homme maigrelet, qui estime avoir assumé la lourde tâche de faire torturer puis assassiner plus de douze mille de ses compatriotes, s'est éclairci la voix, a bu un peu d'eau, puis, au désarroi des responsables de l'interprétation simultanée vers le khmer et l'anglais [...] a récité la fin de La Mort du loup d'Alfred de Vigny :

Gémir, pleurer, prier est également lâche
Fais énergiquement ta longue et lourde tâche
Dans la voie où le sort a voulu t'appeler
Puis, après, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler."

(Kampuchéa, p.18)

These are the melancholic colours that Deville finds to paint the figures of the Khmer leaders. Lost between their childhood in French Asia and their young age in post World War II Paris where sexual revolution was simmering, they dreamt of a Cambodian revolution modeled on the French one -the dream of purity, of absolute, of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse.

He has much harsher words for those who used Asia as a playground for their own personal ambitions. This is for Garnier, who played at being a general throughout south-east Asia and sent thousands of people to death to stage his little wars. This is for Hun Sen, the current leader of Cambodia, put in place by the leaving Vietnamese in 1985 and still in place today. This is for Mayrena, founder and only ruler of the very short lived Royaume de Sedang ("Le Règne du Malin" is the title he chooses to tell the story of the man who became the inspiration for Malraux's Perken in La Voie Royale and Coppola's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now).

Deville spares the poor devils who killed thousands for a dream. He does not forgive those who tricked and manipulated for the sake of their own personal wealth.

This view of South East Asia, through the people who built it, the dreamers who explored it, the madmen who bled it, gives to what should have been a travel book the emotional resonance of a novel. Intentionally, Deville had the word put on the book cover : "roman", indicating that he was not so much interested in presenting historical and geographical facts as in narrating a destiny.