François Beuchat left the novel of his life

Published on December 23, 2024 at 5:32 p.m. / Modified on December 23, 2024 at 6:51 p.m.

1 min. reading

Published in 2005 by Editions d’autre part, The Misfit revealed a 56-year-old author who was in fact not a beginner. Subtitled “Fragments of the novel of a life”, like the two books that followed, The Sparrow in a Jar in 2010, and, finally, The Blue Hours in 2015. Each time, these were fragments from a colossal work of some 20,000 pages written day by day, a long-term process, as discreet as it was obstinate. A sort of search for “lived time”, hours and days resurrected under the pen of a Beuchat by drawing out the substantial marrow. Accuracy of tone, depth of gaze and elegance of language characterize his work, lulling readers into a little joyfully melancholy music.

François Beuchat was the man of a lifetime of remembrance. After the death of his father, he abandoned his studies at the University of Geneva to take refuge for decades in Nidau, with his mother. In addition to a few flamboyant years until his father's small inheritance was almost exhausted, he led a life of solitary seclusion. As its discoverer points out (even if he had published a first book of aphorisms, Ballad in pink and blackPanorama, 1988), his publisher and friend Pascal Rebetez, François Beuchat was a man of great gentleness. When we asked him where this frenzy of writing came from, he replied in his very soft voice: “It’s a need to order things… I have been traveling for a long time through texts and through the mind.”

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