“Les petits musiques” by Roland Buti, a youth put to the test of social mechanics – rts.ch

Sainte-Croix (VD), 1950s. The heavy snow imposes silence on this small industrial city “lurking between two folds of the Jura at the bottom of a lock”. Camera assembler at the Bolex factory, Dino Roccasecca, known as Rocca, was one of the first waves of Italian immigrants to join the production lines of the Vaudois Jura.

Widowed since the birth of his son Ivo, this stocky man meets, like an angel fallen from heaven, the blonde and fine Máša, a film actress of Czech origin. From this conjunction of exiles is born Jana, a resourceful young girl whose freedom stands out in this mountainous universe with its well-regulated mechanics.

The Thirty Glorious Years

Allegorical tale, family tragicomedy, Roland Buti’s fifth novel fascinates with the author’s way of rereading the forms of classic drama in the light of our contemporary history. After “Le milieu de l’horizon”, RTS Public Prize in 2014, adapted for the cinema, and “Grand National” (Prize Lettres frontières 2020), “Les petits musiques” continues a romantic exploration of the Thirty Glorious Romandes, unfolding its plot at the heart of one of the flagships of Swiss industry: precision mechanics, producing record players, cameras, watches, typewriters and Music boxes.

A laborious and monotonous crackling invaded the city; the air was filled with small metallic noises, a continuous clicking sound similar to the buzzing of insects eager to rub their elytra.

The social workings

The metaphor of the musical automaton is clear: the melody of Swiss happiness only works if its components remain in their place. In these social cogs oiled by the anointing of Protestantism, the slightest deviation must be severely corrected. As a teenager and young adult, Jana learned this the hard way.

Like most of the female characters in Buti’s novels, Jana follows her desire. Free of her body, creative spirit, she quickly prefers truant school to the strict lines of school papers. But her independence is frightening: deprived of her freedom “for educational purposes”, the young woman then experiences the internment that many “asocial elements” experienced until the 1970s.

With hindsight, we also see that this period of the Thirty Glorious Years generated many excluded people, and that it is at the origin of an accelerated carbonization of the planet.

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A secret language

Symbol of this manufactured harmony, the music box then plays a concrete role in the novel: Máša works on the export of music boxes produced in Sainte-Croix. To her children, she brings back a bag full of defective Colibri mechanisms, which they take with delight. Through a simple stratagem, Jana discovers that she can trigger the music of these miniature automatons on a delayed basis. The “little musics” then become, in their games, a form of secret language, a rallying sign or bait intended to disorient the enemy.

The refrains of the time, including “Where do I begin”, theme from the film “Love Story”, punctuate the tortuous journey of these two young beings with a tender complicity. Because if the world of adults intends to impose its dull mechanics on them, Ivo and Jana retain, until the end, this “little music” which unites them.

Music of childhood games, to which Roland Buti is intimately linked. From his youth in Sainte-Croix, the Lausanne author has kept the look of his first emotions. Under his pen, the nature of the Vaudois Jura quivers like a great fantastic body, covered in mists, scents and mysterious chasms. A wild atmosphere that triumphs over the rigors of the weather, and enchants us in turn.

Nicolas Julliard/mh

Roland Buti, “Les petits musiques”, Zoé editions, January 2025

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