Literature

Jean Echenoz has breathed new life into French literature in the last thirty years, bringing to it his offbeat, almost magical, style, totally devoid of any heavy psychology and nostalgia. A portrait.

When his publisher died in 2001, Jean Echenoz was the only one who declined to make any tribute in the press. No accolade, no public expression of emotion, not a word. Several generations of authors of the mythical Editions de Minuit [1] did so, but not Echenoz. A few months later, we learned of the publication of his short opus with the handsome final title: Jérôme Lindon. All in all, just two names on the cover, and between the blanks, a whole history: theirs.

Jean Echenoz, the new spring of the publishing house, the leading post-nouveau roman [2] author, the first of a body that was going to emerge, assert itself and make its mark on the French literary scene. In 1979, at the age of thirty-one, he completed a first novel which he did not even dare to send to Minuit: "If that publisher [which he was looking for at the time] could be Jérôme Lindon, it would of course be even better, but let’s not get carried away", he writes. "Too serious, too austere and rigorous a publishing house, essence of literary virtue, too good for me, not even worth trying."

But because he was turned down by all the others, he ended up sending his manuscript to Lindon just the same and so their adventure began with Le Méridien de Greenwich (The Greenwich Meridian). There followed twenty years of working together, from this first novel to the Prix Goncourt, in 1999, for Je m’en vais (I’m Off), with the publisher of Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Nathalie Sarraute, and above all Samuel Beckett, who Echenoz met once but did not dare to speak to. Too shy. A very reserved and modest man, like his novel and the eight others that were to follow.

Critics have sometimes mistaken his distance for "lightness", or for a certain taste for irony: it has often been said of him that he distorted and parodied genres, such as the spy novel in Lac (Lake) (1989), for example. Jean Echenoz himself prefers to explain his novelistic approach as paying homage. Homage to the thriller - and especially to Jean-Patrick Manchette -, to the cinema, to Hitchcock in Les Grandes Blondes (Big Blondes) (1995), whose title makes an immediate allusion to the icy heroines of the "master of suspense".

Taking the form of investigations which have therefore been described as parodies of the whodunnit or the adventure novel, his first three novels - Le Méridien de Greenwich (1979), Cherokee (1983) and L’Equipée malaise (The arduous escapade) (1986) - established him once and for all as one of the most important writers of contemporary French literature, a forerunner of what was to become the new "Minuit school": to save time, an enigmatic, apparently everyday and amusing style, into which rushed authors such as Jean-Philippe Toussaint (La Salle de bain, (The Bathroom) 1985; Faire l’amour (Making Love) 2002), Christian Oster, Christian Gailly...

Disappearance is at the centre of all his books, which gives rise to quests, investigations, and which makes the heart of his literary system an ellipse. However, there is no nostalgia in Echenoz’s work: no psychology, no long explanations, the writer never weighs himself down with constraints and other novelistic conventions and this is what gives it its charm and its strangeness.

Because with him, what we experience is the inexplicable, the everyday mystery: a touch of wonder that invades the most tangible reality and the identities of his characters, sometimes verging on psychopathology, without our ever being able to really grasp them. And this is not limited to the structure of the novel but comes into play from the very construction of a sentence. With Echenoz, reality is already twisted, as though perverted by his words, by a hyper-stylisation which has only increased as his works have progressed. A cat will never be just a cat. In Nous trois (We three) (1992), we read this about a bald man: "Mille cheveux transparents accrochés en camping sauvage au flanc des temporaux." (A thousand transparent hairs camping out on the sides of his temporal bones)

In the course of his interviews, Echenoz uses this recurrent word about his style: he says that he is fond of the moment when the sentence "makes fun of itself". Not for nothing is he a fan of Nabokov, Queneau, Flaubert and Faulkner, masters of the art of alienation. And the dictionary. Echenoz works for four hours every morning, with a huge amount of research - and his novels are often set abroad. Un an (One Year) (1997), however, is set in France and staggered everyone: a drift into the world of those known as the homeless, people of no fixed abode, with an air of Kafkaesque metamorphosis, both a social vision and a plunge into a deranged mind. The flight of a young woman who thinks she has killed her partner, having woken one morning to find him dead at her side.

Two years later, with Je m’en vais (I’m Off), Jean Echenoz cast himself off once more but all the better to return, as in Un an (One year): a circular novel that begins and ends with the same words: "I’m off". Between the two, the narrator will have travelled in the Arctic, no less. He did well to come back: the book landed the most highly regarded literary prize, the Goncourt. But above all, in it can be read all the novelistic journeys of Echenoz: try as you might to go off, search, investigate, it is only your own world that you visit, and it is there that you are bound to return.

A contemporary world made of cold, icy metamorphoses, which we are given to read, to see, amplified a thousand times through the twisted and distorted writing of a writer deeply of his time. Hardly surprising then that he took part, with the best of them, in that grandiose project of producing a new translation of the Bible published by Bayard in 2001. With Echenoz, the world is a system of signs that are read before they are experienced and which have to be written, rewritten, shifted and reorganised, in order to be better decoded.