Véronique Bergen gives her lushly verbose pen no rest. Neither does anyone who reads it. One year after the publication ofFoam (at Onlit, then in Ecuador), the intrepid Belgian academic publishes a new novel, Clandestine, even more devastating. In the meantime, La Lettre Volé published his Before, during and after (on the work of the painter Helena Belzer) and its Guido Crepax. The axiom of eros dedicated to one of the Italian masters of adult comics whose adventures of the cult heroine, Valentinaare the subject of a reissue of the complete by Dargaud, planned in twelve volumes (alas colorized).
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Clandestine… This title makes us think of Vocation: clandestinethe interview that Dominique Aury gave to Nicole Grenier in 1988, which was released in May 1999 in the “L’Infini” collection that Philippe Sollers directed at Gallimard.
Challenge red lights
In some thirty years (since his Jean Genet. Between myth and reality), Véronique Bergen has published around fifty books: novels, stories, essays, collections of poems, mirrors of her prodigious general culture and of a voice identifiable among a thousand: a Niagara of furiously voluptuous images. His work, like his life, is governed only by passion, this fire of the body and the heart which brightens up the cursed November with the sad features of the dead in its month of August.
In her poems as much as in her daring fiction, Véronique Bergen defies red lights: nothing less politically correct than novels like Travel to Mylenia (2012) or Icon H. Helen of Troy (2020). His torrential, baroque prose, all love and lava, is undoubtedly only comparable – in French-speaking Belgian letters – to that, paroxysmal, of the late Marcel Moreau.
Violette, the narrator of Clandestineis revealed to us, from the opening of the novel – so intimate and personal – in a session where she poses for a fetishist photographer with the beauty of “haughty wolf”who cherishes “the animality of silence”. In Brussels, Violette discovers the notebooks of her Jewish grandmother, Nurith, born in 1923, who was trapped with her family in the hell of the Warsaw ghetto; notebooks started in September 1939, during the Wehrmacht invasion of Poland, which contain the atrocities that happened there during the war. They continued until 1958. By reading these writings, Violette opened “the black box of history”.
Unbridled love
These pages which evoke so much suffering suffered by innocent victims, alternate with those which scream the unbridled love which unites Violette to Ishtar, the also madly beautiful Spaniard who left her in 2012 and whom she found ten years later. A passion beyond limits, on the borders of the extreme, translated by Véronique Bergen in chapters of torrid eroticism, of a sado-masochistic nature, which can shock with their crudeness, their absolute frankness. We might as well say it bluntly: we will book Clandestine to an informed public. For this fusion of a frightening historical past and a devilish fantasy connection, we can obviously think of Night porter. Let us remember that to this film by Liliana Cavani, made in 1974, which caused a scandal upon its release and continues to divide, Véronique Bergen devoted one of her most penetrating essays published by Impressions Nouvelles in 2021.
To greet Yourcenar
At the same time as it appears Clandestine, Véronique Bergen expresses, in a thin pocket volume, her admiration for Marguerite Yourcenar (Marguerite de Crayencour, born June 8, 1903 in Brussels, died in Bar-Harbor, Maine, December 17, 1987). She was the first woman elected to the French Academy (on March 6, 1980, in the chair of Roger Caillois), ten years after being welcomed into the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium. This eulogy is number 42 in the monthly collection The article from Éditions Lamiroy (46 pp., €5), collection whose distribution in bookstores is ensured by the House of Poetry of Amay. Véronique Bergen observes that the immensely cultivated Marguerite Yourcenar was “visionary in his ecological battles” and lyrically salutes the author of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951): “Combining the flight of the eagle and the locomotion of the serpent, his writing delivers us fragments of the labyrinth that is the world, meditations on the future of empires, on fevers and religious wars, on the spells of love.” Ultimately, Véronique Bergen recommends reading Yourcenar Biography by Michèle Goslar, excellent essay published by Racine in 1998 and which reappeared in 2014, by L’Âge d’homme, in an expanded version.
⇒ Clandestine | Novel | Véronique Bergen | Éditions Lamiroy (rue Solleveld, 31, box 1, 1200 Woluwe-Saint-Lambert), 296 pp., €25
⇒ Marguerite Yourcenar. First French academician | VSollection Item no.42 | Véronique Bergen |Éditions Lamiroy (rue Solleveld, 31, box 1, 1200 Woluwe-Saint-Lambert), 46 pp., €5
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EXTRACT
“Are we, you and I, illegal immigrants of existence? Do we belong to the brotherhood of clandestine passengers of the civil status, not that of the undocumented, the stateless, but that of beings marked by a residence ban issued, in all conscience or in all unconsciousness, by the parents, by the laws of families, but also by ourselves?”
