Gwenaëlle Aubry's latest novel is about the Covid pandemic in a building inhabited by eight characters. There is a little girl, a construction worker, a lawyer, a student, an old man, a conspiracy theorist… Split into three parts, spring and autumn 2020, summer 2021, the story examines their disrupted existence, according to confinements and deconfinements. They have nothing in common except being separated.
Soon locked up, these beings discover Macron's speech on television, March 16, 2020. We have not forgotten his solemn “We are at war”. The little girl downstairs, on her mother's lap, listened while sucking her thumb. The conspiracy theorist, on the first floor left, has ironed his “favorite sequences”. The old man on the first floor on the right immediately called his lover at the nursing home.
A nod to Perec
The student, in her maid's room, has just brought the virus (the “SARS-CoV-2”, as they called it) into the walls. Nauseated, she remembers, from the depths of her bed, the people she met during the day and feels guilty. On the second right, the costume designer is almost relieved by the announcements.
This has been growing in conversations for weeks, with the arrival of new terms, “cluster”, “coronavirus”, a mutant lexicon based on “domesticated” words: “fever, cough, flu”. We follow the progression of the disease and the new use of the very familiar “hydroalcoholic gel”. No one has a mask and “everyone improvises their own random strategy”.
In the sides of the building, a sudden void; the owners of 3e floor sped off into the Perche. Gwenaëlle Aubry forges numerous links between neighbors. The concierge cleans up the Perche runaways. Her ex, a construction worker, is staying temporarily in one of the maid's rooms, to better see her daughter, the little one on the ground floor, who will have to follow “Maclasseàlamaison” without a computer.
The tenants of 11 bis, rue Winckler (a nod to Perec and his Life instructions) interact mainly at a distance. Gwenaëlle Aubry brings their stories together, if not putting them in direct contact. Bringing life inside the building is therefore the major initial constraint of the text, life outside being put in parentheses.
It is a story (miniature dystopia?) reduced in space, confined in short. A closed session without direct dialogue or handshakes. Isn't this a truly Oulipian challenge: to narrate the life of a building without interaction between the living people who populate it?
Faced with the universal collective experience of Covid, we discover the way in which everyone will be modified by the constraint: no longer going out or almost, living with the fear of meeting the other while suffering from the lack of this other, “diminished” , “sanitized”, “without depth”, only visible on screen… Continue to work, “at a distance”, endure mourning without accompanying it “in real life”. Everyone will succeed in saying “I”, once they have found the others and the outside world.
Zone base vie, by Gwenaëlle Aubry, Gallimard, 268 pages, 21 euros
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