“This old song that burns”, by Alexandre Lenot, Denoël, 240 p., €20, digital €15.
The return of a son to the fold… It’s an old refrain that This old song that burns, second novel by Alexandre Lenot, after Live bark (Actes Sud, 2018). Yet it reads like the dawn of words. Noah walks with his anger, which weighs heavier than the world. The road takes him back to his father. To his brother who is no more. Winds towards their reunion, without knowing whether or not the book will agree to confront the patriarch with the one of his offspring who is still alive.
It is in this suspense that each sentence cascades across the chapter, tumbling from one vision to another, mimicking the syncopated rhythm of walking. Sometimes, it continues in spite of everything, stumbles on the other side of the point – the urgency is such, then, that no clause can interrupt its torn breath. After these years of silence under which the father buried Noah and his twin Jeremiah, getting back on the road is also for him, finally, writing his own story.
Noah is a dancer. In his movements as in his life, he has not yet managed to enter into a relationship with others. So it is with his verse phrases, rejections and counter-rejections, a sumptuous regime of prose and poetry, that he advances. This dazzling romantic song is a tightrope walker’s meditation, above a fragile thread, on what could be said to the starving father. A gesture and its negation, advance and retreat. In what direction, deep down, is Noah walking? Is he leaving, always trying to leave, or does he never stop arriving, coming back?
For how can one live in the orbit of a dead star? Noah knows that the places he is about to return to – the ” Remains “ of the father, “row of empty rooms” on the heights, surrounded by a forest “impenetrable and bushy”the hut built with Jeremiah on the banks of a river to build a life far from the father, the “undergrowth full of humus” – will never be the same again: the one who was the heart of it for him is no more. The house, however, has been amputated from the forest, sold to developers. If the road leading there is the same, a new path must be invented. So he asks questions, begs his father to remember with him. To share part of the journey.
The mechanics of absence
Before dying for his forest, Jérémie had decided to stay with his father, and the twin relationship had shifted. Intrepid when Noah was afraid of everything, he was the favorite son. So Noah walks, swallowed by this question: would his father have preferred that he be the one to die? Is he, Noah, a false living being? The mechanics of absence have reversed their cogs: now that the one whose presence he drank in to spit out the father has dissolved into limbo, he must bring into the circle the one he spent his life keeping away.
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