CRITIQUE – The writer received the Deux Magots prize for his melodious and lucid novel.
Lovers of autofiction, move on. At North Face is probably not for you. It is, fortunately, for many others. Here, no approximate style or narcissistic heroes but a deliciously modest pen.
Jean-Pierre Montal, author of the already very noted Their madness is one of those melancholic novelists who write to the bone and know how to create an atmosphere. We find ourselves rereading a sentence, sometimes two, for pleasure alone. His eye could be that of a filmmaker, and, if his book were to one day be adapted for the big screen, we would not imagine it other than in black and white.
It is precisely about cinema: it is in one of these dark rooms in the Latin Quarter that the narrator, Pierre, 48 years old, a Parisian like one sometimes meets, solitary and eternally disappointed by life and by others, meets a woman much older than him. Florence is 72 years old. “It’s stupid to say, but (his) neck didn’t look his age.” This unlikely duo has a common passion: She and him. They are crazy about this story from the golden age of Hollywood, its two versions, all by Leo McCarey: the one from 1939, with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, and the one from 1957, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
We know this love story between a seducer and a singer, vowing to wait six months before meeting again. Commenting on the film, arguing, preferring one over the other, admitting to crying in front of the screen are their favorite topics of conversation, there will be others…
Of mind and imagination
Florence is a mystery, a serene, disturbing, terribly seductive woman. Her intelligence, her calm, her queenly appearance captivate him, she is unlike anyone. The age difference cannot be an obstacle for Pierre, they talk about it, sometimes have fun with it, already understand that they “got to know each other at the wrong time”. They are in love and clairvoyant, two words that don't go well together. Does he sense that Florence will escape him?
He looks at her with the ardor of someone who doesn't want to forget anything, films her with his eyes, zooms in on her face, records each of her laughs, each of her words.
The novelist passes from one world to another with this elegance, this charm that is never artificial and so often neglected in contemporary literature.
And then it's up to her to write her story. Change of time, of place for that of Vienna in the 1970s, his meeting with a philosophical architect forty years his senior. A passionate adventure for the young girl of the time, in a city “so strange after the war… Hard to imagine today“. A love that is still impossible, but so vivid, unforgettable.
The novelist passes from one world to another with this elegance, this charm that is never artificial and so often neglected in contemporary literature. He is not just sentimental; through his hero, he enjoys the failings of a century to which he does not really seem to belong, ironically about this society without imagination, without spirit.
Jean-Pierre Montal has no shortage of wit and imagination and this novel, melodious and lucid, is the best illustration of it.
Editions Séguier
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