Lhe title chosen by François Durif for his second book, I'll be right backmeans “I’ll be right back”, but we would like to translate it as turn (giro) abrupt, in the plural moreover, as this book is made up of twists, changes at right angles and sudden loops, the author trying to stay the course in all these upheavals.
The first turning point, however, promised to be happy, (almost too) comfortable: after years of hardship, the departure from the world of art and then a job in the funeral industry (retold in Crawl space), François Durif becomes a resident of the Villa Medici. A year without any more financial or even existential questions, since a clear project has been defined and recognized: to mark down its archives, to lighten up, to clear the way. Write about confetti or even organize a carnival in the prestigious French residence in Rome, read, observe, indulge in the full (a book) through the void. This was without taking into account the death of his father then his mother, the stay in Rome interrupted by returns to France, the doubt, the mourning, the carnival impossible to organize. What had been planned as an Italian “transbahutation” to become daily relief becomes weight, doubts, mourning. The investigation into the confetti is filled with childhood memories and losses which translate, in the story, into digressions, gaps, twists and turns.
But, writes François Durif, “an artist is constituted by learning to cope with his own impossibilities, by making the unconscious an ally. To escape the merry-go-round, he develops a form of intelligence that belongs only to him; he does not necessarily take the shortest path knowing that it is the path traveled which modifies him.” The lathe of giro becomes culbutosteep and winding path towards a return to oneself, gathering of confetti and scattered fragments, since the double mourning pulverizes everything, from childhood to today, collection of loved and helpful quotes, complex journey, both literary and Italian and interior: “write to forget”. François Durif drifts, tries to concentrate from this scattering to the four evil winds, becomes this “guy who, while trying to erase his traces, never stops producing new ones and quarreling with himself”.
In doing so he offers a powerful and unclassifiable text, at once ragging, investigation into an infra-ordinary (confetti), autobiography and story of a Roman stay (a literary genre in itself, think of Hervé Guibert or Chloé Delaume). It is not recycling – even if the writer says he is passionate about scrap and waste and proves to be an artist of the material – but a community which is building, before the eyes of readers, a large circle which brings together life and literature, mourning and friendship which saves and carries, fierce solitude and a dreamed community — with Gaëlle Obiégly as culbuto since she “plays with me, she bounces back”, offering a companion text to the author, quoted in full in François Durif's book, like a gift/counter-gift. I'll be right back is the quest as well as the success of a “writing-continuum” which is perhaps the paste of a definitively singular and immensely endearing writer.
François Durif, I'll be right backVerticales, October 2024, 256 p., €22 — Read an extract
