“L’Eclat de Rire” (Roman d’amour), by Sylvie Schenk, translated from German by Olivier Le Lay, Gallimard, “From the whole world”, 190 p., €21, digital €15.
A Frenchwoman living in Germany for nearly sixty years, Sylvie Schenk left her mother tongue aside to write in another, which was initially foreign to her. This gap corresponds to the definition that the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985) gave of love: a decentring towards the other. It is undoubtedly this choice, both reasoned and unreasonable, this element of assumed strangeness, which gives Sylvie Schenk’s style its concision and precision. This detour through another language, not imposed but chosen, also provides the necessary distance to remind the reader that we can never grasp through words the heart of things which always escape. It is this fragility which, paradoxically, gives its strength to The Burst of Laughter : the novel opens like a nut whose breaking reveals unsuspected forms.
It all begins with a conversation between a journalist and an author, Charlotte, whose new novel is going to be presented at a small literature festival in northern Germany. There are a few hours left before the start of the meeting, and it is in this temporal parenthesis that the story takes place. At first glance it seems like a novel about a novel, before the conversation turns into a duel between the journalist, who tries to delve into Charlotte’s personal life, and the latter, who defends the privileges of fiction.
Titled in the original German edition Love novel, the novel written by Charlotte offers many similarities between a story lived by the latter and that of her heroine, Klara, insists the journalist. But the more one strives to establish parallels between the real and the imaginary, the more the resistance of the other asserts itself. It does not only highlight vanity and superficial denials, but real narrative imperatives. Because, she pleads, what better recourse, to talk about reality, than the detour of fiction? How better to say what happened than through the transformation of experience?
Mises en abyme
At the risk of annoying Charlotte, the journalist nevertheless continues to dig: Klara, director of a school in Ireland, had an affair with a married teacher and father – a broken affair which almost cost her her life. Didn’t Charlotte herself, a few years earlier, take a trip to Ireland with a professor with whom she was madly in love and who abruptly abandoned her to go find his wife, who suddenly disappeared? ? A disappearance as brutal as a slammed door, to which, strangely, the journalist seems to hold the key.
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