Discovering, on the borders of Louisiana, an island sinking into the waters and bearing his father’s first name – Jean-Charles –, the idea came to him. A silent, gentle and solitary man, he claims to have no memories. Observing her, listening to her does not give her daughter what she is looking for. She will, from then on, endeavor to solicit his memory through landscapes, vestiges of travel, notebooks, correspondence, objects or any other trace of his real personality. The one she didn’t see.
Prix Goncourt: here are the authors who appear on the first list
A memory container
He collected everything. Visiting with him the now abandoned studio where he painted for twenty years, she is overwhelmed by the piles of heterogeneous remains which have been compulsively piled up there, intertwining the threads of her destiny and testifying for her to an unprecedented reality. . Of this father who shared her little girl’s games and remained a child himself all his life, she discovers a new image.
That of a man who had a busy life, loved traveling, was a desperate teenager, hated the Algerian war in which he participated, was harsh, excessive, a committed artist, passionate about surrealism, evil with himself, denigrating the hypocrisy, comfort or relationships of domination that he nevertheless suffered from his own father. Going back to the latter, the narrator devotes a detailed chapter to him, focusing her attention on what, in his behavior could have influenced Jean-Jacques whom, moreover, he called Jean-Karl. She questions places through images.
She lists the objects, words, texts, writings on the walls, all these surprising stacks which form a receptacle of memory like so many archipelagos of a truth which we never fully grasp. Even if the father, with good will, helps to bring it to light.
The delicate writing combined with an endearing subject in itself contribute to the interest of this book. But the meticulous and repeated enumerations, the accumulation of trivial details – except undoubtedly for the narrator – overload the reading and often make it tedious.
⇒ “Archipelagos” | Story | Hélène Gaudy | L’Olivier, 288 pp., €21, digital €15
EXTRACT
“His appetite for places seemed little nourished by nostalgia. He never showed us those of his past, he never described them to me. Sometimes he barely let slip a few aesthetic considerations like, Beauce is beautiful, or, You should go see the cathedral of Chartres My father likes landscapes but I don’t know anything about those where he grew up.
