Je te verrai dans mes rêves by Alain Gerber

Abstract

Argentina by a right-wing coup. Later his infant daughter drowned due to a moment of distraction on the part of his wife, Mélina. She in turn falls victim to an accident that leaves her for weeks in a vegetative state until she finally dies. While his wife lies comatose, Nestor is befriended by a doctor, Alice, who finds in the man’s suffering and withdrawal from life an echo of her own emotional repression . The novel chronicles Nestor’s deepening alienation and physical dissolution , culminating in his death. The name “Nestor” is common in Hispanic culture, and perhaps it has no significance besides identifying the person who bears it. However, given the military allusion in the novel’s title, it is difficult not to think of Homer’s Nestor in The Iliad, a wise old man to many, yet someone Robert Graves describes as a sanctimonious fool in The Anger of Achilles (1959). The contradictory implications of the name are worth pursuing since they may suggest something fundamental about Nestor’s character. The man has certainly suffered, and his self-destructive retreat from life might well have its origins in the awful things he endured. However, the sensation of uneasiness Nestor engenders so greatly precedes the discovery of the origins of his travails that the reader begins to wonder whether what has always plagued Nestor is not the unfairness of life, but life itself: “Il se laissait glisser, conscient qu’à n’avoir aucune raison de vivre, on n’en a pas non plus pour mourir” (25). While the death of his daughter is an unbearable shock, it seems also to be a catalyst, an experience that frees him to give vent to his anger at existence and more specifically to express this rage in his sustained, ugly treatment of his guilt-ridden wife. It does not matter whether Nestor is right or wrong when he muses, “Pour réussir sa vie, il fallait rester à côté” (34), since the novel indicates that such an option is not available. The strengths of this novel lie in its refusal to state clearly the reasons for Nestor’s disillusionment and to avoid an overtly sympathetic treatment of his plight. Nestor rend les armes is an extended meditation on the unbearable weight of existence and the vanity of human aspiration. While hardly an enticing subject, it is a tribute to the author’s talent that she can for the most part sustain the reader’s interest. Nestor may well be incapacitated by the crippling nature of his own thoughts, but he never becomes a nombriliste. In fact his musings can be so compelling that his relationship to Alice, the rather bizarre doctor, is as annoying to the reader as it is to him. She appears almost as an afterthought in the novel, someone who provides a bit of physical activity in a story otherwise located in one person’s mind. As the story moves toward its conclusion, the author seems to lose confidence in her narrative. Alice plays a larger, yet inconclusive role, and Mélina’s friend, Maria, is revealed to be a prostitute, as if to suggest that emotional distance trumps the pain of feeling. The ending is heavy rather than somber, as the novel’s initial promise remains somewhat unfulfilled. Florida State University William Cloonan GERBER, ALAIN. Je te verrai dans mes rêves. Paris: Fayard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-213-60879-2. Pp. 205. 18 a. Gerber continue ici sa série, entamée depuis 2002, de romans de jazz, des “biofictions ” (Alain Buisine) bénéficiant de sa connaissance de l’univers jazzistique. Toutefois avec ce roman il franchit une nouvelle étape. En effet, Insensiblement 414 FRENCH REVIEW 86.2 (2010), sur Django Reinhardt, s’appuyait sur la recherche musicologique et ajoutait peu d’épisodes fictionnels. Comme pour d’autres musiciens dans des romans précédents, Gerber nous introduisait dans l’imaginaire intime de l’artiste, en conservant ce qui, de la biographie, était avéré. Je te verrai dans mes rêves pousse la fictionnalisation plus loin, puisque le narrateur y est à la recherche d’un musicien qui n’a jamais existé: inventé par Woody...