DIACRITIKHands in the pockets: Olivier Rolin, Seven cities

Olivier Rolin, dans Towards the scattered islandsarticulates places and literature (a constant in his work) and he evokes the life of books around the world, through hotel or café libraries: “it gives these books a discreet and hazardous life, and me — the piece of me that they lock away — an unknown life.” In Seven cities (1988), which has just been published in parallel and in paperback (still by Verdier, in a revised version), it is in a way the opposite movement, these are the places which bring out beloved books, the urban itineraries are literary maps. “Cities are typewriters, and written machines.”

Rolin’s sentence perhaps calls The Literature Machine by Italo Calvino, this link of the playful and the literary, of walking and writing, of real places inseparable from imagined places, written therefore partly imaginary from now on: Prague is Kafka, Trieste is inseparable from Svevo, Alexandria by Durrell. Each city is also a portrait of a writer and each writer inseparable from a city, a Literature machinewhich is demonstrated by each of the Seven cities crossed by Olivier Rolin – Buenos Aires, Trieste, Lisbon, Alexandria, Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg), Havana and Prague -, “cities, books”, title of the writer’s unpublished introduction. Thanks be to the Poche editions for bringing texts back to life (these, in particular), for inviting people to (re)discover or re (read) them, for giving temporal depth to both geographical and literary itineraries.

Olivier Rolin first wrote these different texts for Liberation et Citythey date from the 80s, they “speak of the past from a present which has itself become the past…. A vanished landscape, literary and urban, can be seen there. They are witnesses of the world of yesterday, and the day before yesterday.” However, they have not taken on a wrinkle or crease, and Seven cities can be read like a literary travel guide, an invitation to leave as if to travel motionless.

These cities are in fact “semi-imaginary” since “built” by “writers, with their perspectives and their avenues and their quays of words, their domes and their columns of words, and also their trash cans, sewers, scum, waste dumps. words. Those that they have populated with their characters, so strangely alive that we sometimes come across them unexpectedly, and it is as if a long-awaited meeting had finally happened.

Unlike Perec, Olivier Rolin does not attempt to exhaust the places, the cities resist the “delicious onmastico-topographico-literary discipline”, the constraint, he does not succeed in “bringing the city into force seen in the city read”, everything overflows and escapes, it is in the failure of the “method” that writing plays out. On returning from each of his trips, Olivier Rolin collects small souvenirs – a packet of sugar, a bus ticket, a page from the day’s newspaper, “trinkets in which we convince ourselves that, unknown to vulgar minds, the essence of the city” — but above all these pages born from the “empire of chance”, noting that six of the seven cities written are ports, therefore (il)limited places, the sea opening as well as closing the perspective. All these cities buzz with diverse languages, diasporas, they mix pages and temporalities, titles and geographies. To be a writer is to be a citizen of the world, Outside world whatever the place we take, temporarily, as the center of our gaze, in a Invention of the world.

Lire Seven citiesit’s superimposing one’s own imagination of places on that of Rolin and that of the authors he evokes (especially authors…), it’s surveying a library as much as a map, it’s leafing through a photo album , it is the paradox of recognizing what we did not know. “You read one of those books in which a city is the setting and then, arriving one day for the first time, you notice that nothing has changed since you never went there.” Rolin has no equal in making you want to weigh anchor, once you have discovered what he calls “educated coincidences” and once you follow his text in its “almost infinite possibility of bifurcation, detour and misdirection, which very few authors resist (not me, in any case).”

Olivier Rolin, Seven citiesVerdier pocket editions, January 2025, 128 p., €9