We loved her when reading “Saint-Salopard, the Maurice Sachs Mystery”, her previous novel which had won the Hussards and Nice-Baie des Anges prizes. We are rediscovering it this literary season in a more introspective vein. Here, Barbara Israel focuses on a couple in their fifties, Moïse and Antoine, who drift from club to bar; if one refuses to leave adolescence, the other no longer knows how to feign carelessness – “tired of his nights where he is content to mime his first impulses”. Sooner or later, even excesses become coated with the lacquer of habit and lines of coke are no longer enough to hide existence. The unexpected meeting of an old and kind friend, Zac, will shake up the couple’s precarious balance. Far from Paris, in Athens, in the middle of the ruins, another life is possible.
“Present to themselves”
These “two vulnerable souls” then commune with the elements, the settings and the places. Hence this extreme attention to lights, to winds, to beings. Beauty is experienced everywhere. Even a violent earthquake will not be able to make this superior magic disappear, because Antoine and Moise have become “terribly present to themselves” […] In a simultaneous gesture, each reached out to the other’s face. The cracked brilliance of childhood had survived the dust and the bankruptcies. They are no longer contrite; the peaks emerge. It all starts again. And memories are no longer desires that we regret. These two knew how to reclaim their history.
Barbara Israel strives, in small touches, to reveal an intimate order and to fix what has no essence other than to go away. She accompanies what ends and especially what is reborn, advances on tiptoe, brushes past her characters, slips into their shadows and their interstices. Where other writers experiment, expose and overexpose, she gives feeling. The emotion arises on the words. Breaths of unreality and a foretaste of infinity.
“The Beauty of Ruins”, by Barbara Israel, ed. Flammarion, 260 p., €20, ebook, €14.99.
