“Among other solitudes”, by Yves Harté, Le Cherche Midi, “Les passe-murailles”, 176 p., €19, digital €13.
Yves Harté, Grand Prix of the French Academy for Hand on Heart (Le Cherche Midi, 2022), publishes, with the same publisher, Among other solitudes. “My father died in the winter, at the very beginning of 2004, when he was about to be 70 years old”he writes. Empty the house. What do we keep? A grueling ritual, double mourning… A lackluster journalist, the son returns without enthusiasm to the house of the dead father: father and son no longer speak to each other. Very quickly, Among other solitudes takes off, as if sucked in by the powerful storms there – on the edge of the Landes and the Pyrenees.
A journalist, Yves Harté was himself, a major reporter and editorialist for the newspaper Southwest (Prix Albert-Londres 1990), author of notable portraits and reports. It’s not about “him”, but he is concerned. Its narrator, a melancholic bachelor, in his forties, comes down from Bordeaux towards the Pyrenees. Which fades or emerges, depending on the winds. On returning from the completed ritual, the Pyrenees and the skies merge in his rearview mirror: “It seemed to me that I was leaving the country of my childhood forever. »
It is the novel of endings, that of the disappearance of the countryside. Not that they were explicitly condemned, moreover: a piece of vineyard, six cows, “the land was still good, but no longer suited the times.” Disappearance of those times when humans spoke to animals (who responded to them with an accent), erasure of landscapes, tools, berets and speech…
Harté has never separated his journalistic writing from literature itself: it is the least courtesy he owes the reader, he says. Among other solitudes quickly turns into a formidable machine for rewinding the mechanics of ends. In the unsaleable squat farm where the father had holed up, the modest forty-year-old gets his hands on a file in his name, carefully classified (and annotated!) by the dead father (who was a teacher and rugby coach).
White shadows
The file brings together articles that he wrote twenty years earlier, with a view to a collection, quickly abandoned, on solitude. Portraits of fallen women, bar pillars, rugby pillars who no longer play fifteen, but two, “head to head” with alcohol. Talkative or silent solitaries, the white shadows of the Café jaune made them die of laughter like one laughs at 20, him, the apprentice journalist, and two friends his age. So many disfigured lives, cruel destinies reinvented in twelve lines.
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