At the beginning, there is something like a desire for white paradise. Alaska. It was there, at the dawn of the 1980s, that a young French academic, who had been living in New York for several years, applied to teach courses on the Fairbanks campus. Her name is Chantal Thomas, she writes in the never-quite-distant light of Roland Barthes, has not yet published (today she is the grace and beauty of our literature). In the meantime, change of program. Since Alaska ultimately doesn’t want her, she falls back, with some misfortune, on the next American state in the alphabetical list: it will therefore be Arizona. Goodbye to the Far North and hello to the desert.
His unique way of seeing in men, women, landscapes, what no one knows how to see there
For six months from January to June 1982, she taught Marivaux, in Tucson, to cowboys who were not all Ronald Reagan, and cowgirls who were as radical as they were sometimes fragile. The beautiful affair that she scrupulously records in the evening, between more or less advanced flirtations and perfectly chosen solitude, in her diary.
The dream and its imposture
It is this one, barely retouched, she assures, that the author of “Farewell to the Queen” and “Souvenirs of Low Tide” is publishing this spring – a season that suits her complexion and style. . Let’s say it straight away, it’s enchanting. We find there, even if for the first time as a diarist, everything that makes the deep, perfect, almost adamantine singularity of the writing and ultimately of the entire work of Chantal Thomas. Her unique way of seeing in men, women, landscapes, what no one knows how to see there, except her and therefore her reader.
This is America. His promise, his dream, his imposture sometimes.
Gardens under the moon
In this fruitful disorder that is Tucson, surrounded by silence and desert, wildness and delicacy mixed together, the professor of French literature imagines bringing together Georges Simenon and Jack Kerouac, having resided in these places before her. It’s his freedom. She is sovereign. She writes postcards to her mother. She instigates trips (to Mexico in particular, in the last part of the book, crossed as if in a dream).
She writes down her dreams. She abandons herself to the night, that of meetings, of loves too, of large gardens under the moon. She thinks of Marivaux, Barthes and Bécassine…
She has major problems with driving (properly hilarious pages like a portrait of the artist as Buster Keaton). Brief sorrows. Violent joys. She drinks wine and tequila. She blends into the crowd, never into the crowd. One day she will leave since she knows, after Cendrars, that “when you love you have to leave”. It’s not sad since sadness is bad manners. And then, anyway, she will come back. In a book. And we will accompany him.
“Journal of Arizona and Mexico” by Chantal Thomas, ed. Threshold, 178 p., €21, ebook, €14.99.
