“Each book is someone”, consider Joseph Portedor, the hero of Guillaume Sire. Without necessarily going that far, there is one certainty: this novel is “someone”! We can hear, between the lines, the writer's heart beating. From the prologue, we are struck by a texture, a wound, a strangeness, a thickness, that of “scarred by love”. If the expression applies to the brothel in which Joseph's mother cleans (“a place where men learned to train sadness, like a rabid dog locked in a mansion”), these abrasions of love act as a link between the characters.
The first of them is Joseph, a little boy who feels everything: he just needs to touch an object or a being to detect its components – physical and metaphysical -, guess illnesses, pregnancies, etc. “It’s a disease,” will entrust a Joseph who has left childhood to his friend Vadim. Who will have this sumptuous reply: “A disease that tells the truth, I call it a gift. » The depths of this sensitivity are revealed to the reader while with every fiber of his mind Joseph feels the scent of the letter announcing his father's death in the war, in November 1915.
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“The envelope smelled of hay and sealing wax. She had passed through with food equipment in a hangar on the banks of the Marne. Joseph imagined the beet fields and the water bends among the gray sheep. The paper was resistant: sagging on the third, lack of weight on the flap, cinnabar trimmings, hesitations, concentric stains. » The “hesitations” of the paper: the scope of this word, at this moment, relative to this letter; there is something there to make you believe in the god of writing. Which, moreover, monitors each of the descriptions of paper or envelope – one of the motifs of the novel. Nothing that touches, shelters, contains or supports a word can be insignificant.
“The slag of laminated cardboard, its cloudy white, the ink, the outline of the letters. » The unsaid ones, too. The white around the words. “White as skin. White like the keys of a piano. White as a blind man's eyes. White as panties. White like seabirds. The white of pearls, that of the crosses of Verdun, the white of the sand in the Virgin Islands, the white of King David and the musketeers' scarf, the white of the statues, that of the moon, and that of the Pyrenees when they fly into the middle of the sky and suddenly become white, white, like everything in this world that is immemorial and perfect.
…white as, on a deep wound, a drop of milk. »
Guillaume Sire reveals the flesh of words, “their inky skin, their clarity”. He goes to track down the meaning even in the choice of fonts. Through them, he analyzes nothing less than the rise of Hitlerism.
“The content of newspapers, since they published photos of Hitler, has changed. Journalists choose sentences that have more inertial force – and which therefore spoil the pages. The editorial secretaries adapted the fonts, swapping the didone with classic serifs for the real one with widespread serifs. When the old words manage to find a place among the new ones, their vowels, instead of opening, swallow. As for the punctuation, still loose and floral in 1928, it dries up from 1929, and gives the sentences a syncopated rhythm, whose accelerations suggest the blows of a water hammer on a door which we will realize once broken down that it was not locked. Inserted in the columns, photos of Hitler and his troops occupy a space previously owned by the language of Molière. »
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His crazy coexistence with consonants and vowels will nourish Joseph – who will become a librarian – with all the intensities. “If Thérèse had known to what extent reading would nourish in her son's soul this inclination which led him to all the pissy puddles to drink them, and to the levels of the gardens, to furrow the earth, to suck the bulbs, to irritate the blood in nettles; if she had known how language would take shape within him, like a plant that destroys another plant by growing inside it, […] she would never have taken Joseph on her knees to teach him to read. […] Is it dangerous to know how to read? » Guillaume Sire's book answers that words are the matrix of the Universe.
There are words, and there is music, and more precisely Schumann and his « passages secrets ». Schumann arrives through Anima Halbron, the little Jewish pianist who is three years older than Joseph and who comes to live in the apartment below – he on the second floor, she on the first. The little sniggering witch-fairy whose musician father yelled at the movers when he was hoisting the quarter-cock into the stairwell: “A piano is a people, it doesn’t bang against walls, a people!” » His room is just below Joseph's. Every morning she plays the piano before school.
“The music came to his bed through the floorboards. They were phrases of pink, lilac, violet, purple, indigo. Joseph felt his muscles tense. The notes were in his sheets. They rested on his eyelids. He had heard the piano played before, but never like this. He guessed the click of the ash hammers on the triples steel ropes, the creaking of the pedal board, the nails on the keys, the crushed wool of the damper levers, the hammer catcher, the bridge, the escapement stick. He convinced himself that Anima, by playing, was sending him a message. The notes wove a web from one floor to the other and attached padlocks to it. »
However, he had not waited for the first note to be tied up in love. As soon as he saw Anima in the corridor on the ground floor, the emotion was such that he lost consciousness. From that day on, the knight of the rose in Joseph's head was never silent again, constantly repeating to him, to the point that it is the refrain of the book: ” I love you. I have always loved you. You won't die. I will protect you. » She, for her part, “was struck by lightning” seeing in Joseph the ghost of Gabriel, this big brother whose death threw their mother into silence and she, Anima, into an ugly, guilty pain that put her out of reach. But maybe not from Joseph.
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“Usually she wore her pleated skirt falling below the knee, her everlasting socks and a boy's blouse; she had angelic fingers and patches on her skin from bed fleas. She wasn't very beautiful. She looked at him askance, but she looked at him. She raised her hand, perhaps to run it through Joseph's hair, and finally gave up, shook her head. Sometimes she insulted him: “Little shit, little apple of shit, whining, mosquito…” Her voice was honey and poison, blood and milk. Joseph would have recognized her among millions. »
This great novel of absolute and absolutely impossible love is as if sewn into the black fabric of anti-Semitism – because we follow Anima and Joseph (who follows Anima in thought and sometimes in action) from the First to the Second World War. From Toulouse to Lutetia via the prisons of Koblenz under the snow, the hunt by the Nazis and the maquis.
The great strange homelands of Guillaume Sire, Calmann-Lévy, 360 pages, 21.90 euros. (Credits: LTD)
Hatred of the Jews innervates the book: Joseph's mother believes that the Jews eat the hearts of children and forbids him from approaching Anima. “She will act as if she is your friend, then, when you are no longer suspicious, she will kill you. – How do you know? – All Jews do this” ; the doctor, the only one in the neighborhood, who, “notorious anti-Semite”, does not respond to Anima's father's cries for help when Gabriel is dying; the same musician father whose Jewishness condemns him to stop playing the piano and become a mover; “the “Death to the Jews” graffitied on the facades of workers’ houses. The paint used to write these three words is red, dark, quick-setting; it makes strings of droplets where the brush has insisted. » Always the substance of words, literally and figuratively, that Joseph probes endlessly.
And then these “terrible things” that we tell “about the Jews kidnapped by the Germans and taken behind the fog, to the east”. “Things of the devil”, his friend Michel would later say to Joseph. The latter will discover the unspeakable result at Lutetia. Here again, it is the substances which reveal their secrets to it. The substances, “unknown to doctors, and perhaps unknown to God himself”, secreted by the organs of survivors. Without doubt the soul of the book lies in this exchange with Anima the day she came to tell him that she and her parents were going to leave Toulouse for Paris:
“Is what they say true?
– What are we talking about?
– That you are a sick madman, and that because of this illness inanimate things address you, as if you had an evil power.
– It's not an illness.
“Actually, you're Jewish.”
At that moment, she kissed him, and with her tongue.
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