L'Anarchiste is an unusual novel in more ways than one. Its structure is articulated
in two very distinctive parts : the first part, written or translated in a
strangely awkward French, exposes the crisis of a young Cambodian narrator
suddenly losing control of violent inner fantasies whilst the second covers in
a much plainer language the life of a middle-aged narrator living the poor life
of a forgotten refugee in Paris.
Here are a few randomly
picked up examples from the early chapters:
p.32 : "L'idée de la mort est dévorante. Impliquée dans
l'écoulement du temps, elle nous harcèle sans répit ; mais l'intensité de
l'émotion que nous procure l'amour arrive à égaler et à compenser celle de
l'idée de la mort". "Impliquée" here is the wrong word, too vague.
"arrive à égaler" is awkward, "parvient à égaler" would have
been better. "celle de l'idée de la mort" is very awkward too, proper
French would avoid at all cost the repeated prepositional structure "de l'idée de la mort".
p.32 :"le type pleure à chaudes larmes, se lamentant à corps
perdu". "type" and
"chaudes larmes" belong to two different levels of language :
"type" is informal, "chaudes larmes" is quite literary. "se lamenter à corps perdu" is
improper use of the expression "corps perdu".
p.34 : "C'est pour cela que je ne condamnerai jamais les gens qui
s'aiment, même si c'est d'un amour non conventionnel". There
is nothing wrong per se with the sentence; it is simply too common language,
with again the use of imprecise words like "gens". A better attempt would have been
"Pour cette raison" (replacing the ugly "c'est...que" and
the vague "cela") "je ne condamnerai jamais les êtres (far
better than "gens") qui s'aiment, fût-ce ("même si c’est"
is very common) d'un amour non conventionnel".
p34: "Nous sommes si impuissants devant cette fumée qui est la
nôtre". The nasty hiatus
"si impuissant" was easy to avoid by using "tellement
impuissant" instead, which sounds better.
In spite of these
flaws this opening part is a pure dionysiac enjoyment, a jump towards fire, an
eruption. In this oneiric tale we attend the surge of the anarchist monster who
is (hiding in) A-Chheèm the narrator: his attempt as strangling a prostitute,
his fever, his sudden vomiting, the beautiful love scene with his cousin Sinuon
and its dramatic conclusion in a psychiatric hospital. We are undoubtedly in a
baroque geste, the carnival universe where dreams and reality melt into each
other. In this respect A-Chheèm seems related to such heroes as Cendrars’s
Moravagine, while to the modern reader he will evoque Louis Althusser’s tragic
story or even Léos Carax’s surreal creation Merde
(2008).
But while the first
part belongs to the impulse, the impetus, the rush upwards, the second is the
tale of a collapsing. Starting with the death of a woman, it continues with the
narrator’s Don Juan-like exploits, climaxes on the conquest of his sister-in-law
whom he calls Mary at the beginning, Mona at the end (1) and “the woman of his life” throughout, moves to the
assassination of his best friend Savouth (2) by some Cambodian officials, then tells of the narrator’s revenge and the
anti-climax of his escape to France. The chilling conclusion with its atrocious
final scene seals the destiny of a weak and coward character whose untidy
passions make him unfit for both the revolutionary Khmer society and the
Parisian bourgeois culture. As he confesses himself, the only society where his
disorderly inner self would have found a way out would have been the half
dreamt, half remembered Cambodia from the French colonial period - the very
same society he contributed to destroy.
This divide in the
book is strikingly akin Cendrars's Dan
Yack. Particularly fascinating is this double movement, first towards the sublime then towards the abyss, and how the anarchist monster who is (in) the narrator throws
him in turns towards the former and the latter. Reflecting about Dan Yack, Cendrars talked about a
movement "outwards then inwards", like an explosion followed by a
recoil, both ending up in failure. This, it seems, is exactly what L'Anarchiste takes us through, up to the
final pages where even the mutilation falls within a much cruder and grimer version of Dan Yack. Cendrars's main character is a Russian
millionaire incapable of finding happiness with or without the riches
which life has poured upon his head. L'Anarchiste's narrator is similarly trapped
between an inescapable and an unattainable future. For this encaged self, any
attempt at breaking through -be it fantasized or real- ends up in blood.
(1) Could this be in relation to Henry Miller’s Mona in Sexus?
(2) Savouth was Cambodia's Education Minister at the time and a close friend to the narrator
