L’art de revenir à la vie par Martin Page

Abstract

Reviews 273 qu’on attribue à la fiction plutôt qu’à l’histoire. On apprend notamment que, quand Maalouf a écrit son tout premier livre, Les croisades vues par les Arabes, il s’est appuyé en grande partie sur L’histoire des croisades de Joseph Michaud. Le hasard veut que Maalouf occupe aujourd’hui le fauteuil tenu jadis par Michaud. S’agit-il du hasard ou d’un coup divin opéré sur une filiation spirituelle? University of Portland Khadija Khalifé Page, Martin. L’art de revenir à la vie. Paris: Seuil, 2016. ISBN 978-2-02-117496-0. Pp. 170. This “roman/autofiction/science-fiction” (168), as the narrator, Martin, calls it, relates strange events happening during a little over a week in the life of a writer whose idea of excitement, he tells us at first, is knowing he will be able to pay his rent.Actually, things are more serious, as his house in a Belgian village needs expensive repairs to its furnace and its roof. His partner, Coline, a musician, has gone with their small child to Sweden to make a recording, and Martin has deferred his own trip there to spend a well-paid week in Paris writing a screenplay based on one of his books. Unfortunately, Paris aggravates his many health problems, which he says include a fragile“homéostasie psychologique”(10), asthma, hypochondria, and bipolar disorder. He narrates each event shortly after it occurs, and his early accounts are understandably gloomy, especially as the producer of the planned film, Sanaa Okaria, first wants to make major changes to the plot, then abandons the project entirely and, insisting that his contract obliges him to do whatever she asks, employs Martin on increasingly intimate activities she herself should do, including packing her possessions in anticipation of a move, visiting her blind sister in a mental institution (while wearing Sanaa’s perfume), and going to her doctor’s appointment for her. Each night in the apartment that a Parisian friend has lent him, Martin sleeps in a sculpture the friend has made, a sort of coffin labeled a “machine à remonter le temps” (18). Perhaps he does travel back in time, or perhaps he merely dreams he is doing so. But each night he meets his twelve-year-old self and, at first, tries to prepare the adolescent Martin for the problems he will face with school, friendships, employment, and love. Yet it is the boy who helps the man, giving him renewed optimism by reconnecting him with his youthful hopes and making him see that his life is not a failure: he has a partner, a child, and a career as a writer, even if the latter is precarious. The narrator has cheered up greatly by the end, having figuratively returned to life by deciding to be faithful to his youthful optimism. The author, the non-fictional Martin, is a prolific writer of novels, essays, and children’s literature. He also blogs and publishes fantasy under the anagrammatic open pseudonym Pit Agarmen. Like the fictional Martin, he and his partner, Coline Pierré, a musician, have created a small publishing house and silkscreen studio called Monstrograph. One of his Pit Agarmen books, La nuit a dévoré le monde, has just been filmed. In that respect and, it seems, in others, he seems to be significantly more successful professionally than the fictional Martin. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Reza,Yasmina. Babylone. Paris: Flammarion, 2016. ISBN 978-2-0813-7599-4. Pp. 219. Il n’est pas fortuit que ce roman commence par une référence à la collection de photos de Robert Frank, The Americans (1958). Cette méditation sur le passage du temps, sorte de chronique d’instants, d’instantanés en quelque sorte, s’apparente à l’observation de la vie quotidienne des photos dites “de rue” de Robert Frank, remarquables par l’authenticité des sujets qu’elles saisissent au hasard. La photo du Témoin de Jéhovah, Awake, choisie dès la première page par la narratrice, semble calquer au plus près la démarche de l’auteure, par ce qu’elle révèle d’humanité et de solitude. À l’image...